We present a new form of online tracking: explicit, yet unnecessary leakage of personal information and detailed shopping habits from online merchants to payment providers. In contrast to the widely debated tracking of Web browsing, online shops make it impossible for their customers to avoid this dissemination of their data. We record and analyse leakage patterns for the 881 most popular US We...

Despite significant efforts by merchants, card issuers and law enforcement to curb fraud, online fraud continues to plague electronic commerce web sites. More advanced solutions are desired to protect merchants from the constantly evolving problem caused by fraud. The supervised machine learning technique for the most well known fraud detection algorithms makes them inadequate for an online sys...

Recent U.S. antitrust litigation and concerns by regulatory authorities over fees in Australia and the European Union have questioned the nature of various bilateral relationships and associated fees underlying credit card transactions. A two-period model is constructed to study the interactions among consumers, merchants, and a card issuer. The model yields the following results. First, if the...

Mistakenly-tagged low prices are harmful to online merchants but difficult to avoid completely, thus it is meaningful to track shoppers' abnormal response to them and develop resolutions accordingly. In light of relevant issues received rare attention from both practitioners and researchers, this work aimed to identify shoppers’ typical behavioural reactions to ultra-low prices at Internet merc...

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM March 1999/Vol. 42, No. 3 81 However, the potential of the Internet for transforming commerce is largely unrealized. Electronic purchases are still largely nonautomated. While information about products and vendors is more easily accessible, and orders and payments are dealt with electronically, humans are still in the loop in all stages of the buying process, adding t...

Most of the software agents only perform simple product price comparisons; some support the purchase of products or the negotiation over multiple terms of a transaction, such as, e. g., warranties, return policies, delivery times and loan options. Auctions help to find an effective pricing mechanism in electronic commerce. The active technologies enabling customers to purchase efficiently force...

We study the effect of government encouraged or mandated interchange fee ceilings on consumer and merchant adoption and usage of payment cards in an economy where card acceptance is far from complete. If the pre-regulatory interchange fee was optimal, any change in the interchange fee would result in lower aggregate welfare for consumers, merchants, and banks. Merchant acceptance of debit and c...