We propose a merchant-regulatory framework to promote investment in the European natural gas network infrastructure based on a price cap over two-part tariffs. As suggested by Vogelsang (2001) and Hogan et al. (2010), a profit maximizing network operator facing this regulatory constraint will intertemporally rebalance the variable and fixed part of its two-part tariff so as to expand the conges...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the frequency, circumstances, and causes of occupational accidents aboard merchant ships in international trade, and to identify risk factors for the occurrence of occupational accidents as well as dangerous working situations where possible preventive measures may be initiated. METHODS The study is a historical follow up on occupational accidents among crew aboard D...

Daily-deal business model is a type of performance-based advertising wherein a publisher provides advertising space to a merchant who pays a proportion of revenue generated on the website to the publisher. We develop a two-period model to capture the strategic interaction between a publisher and a merchant where consumers are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for quality and awareness a...

Daily deal websites help small local merchants to attract new consumers. A strategy adopted by some websites is to continually track and display the number of deals sold by a merchant. We investigate the strategic implications of displaying deal sales and the website's incentive to implement this feature. We analyze a market in which a merchant o ering an experience good is privately informed o...

This paper presents models that explain why merchants accept payment cards even when the fees they face exceed the transactional benefits they receive from a card transaction. Such merchant behaviors can be explained by competition among merchants and/or the effectiveness of the merchant’s card acceptance in shifting cardholders’ demand for goods upward. The prevalent assumption used in payment...

Fingerprinting is an essential tool to shun legal buyers of digital content from illegal redistribution. In fingerprinting schemes, the merchant embeds the buyer’s identity as a watermark into the content, so that the merchant can retrieve the buyer’s identity when he encounters a redistributed copy. To prevent the merchant from dishonestly embedding the buyer’s identity multiple times, it is e...

This paper presents a novel method of using Dynamic Soft Descriptor as a fraud prevention method for Merchant (as opposed to card Issuer) in a credit/debit card transaction under Card Not Present (CNP) environment, such as online transactions. A unique identifier is embedded into the transaction descriptor, which will instantly appear in the cardholder’s credit/debit card online statement. By c...

This paper examines how competition among payment card networks—three-party scheme networks and four-party scheme networks—affects pricing as well as the welfare of various parties. A competing network has an incentive to provide rewards to its card users. By providing more generous rewards than its rival networks, the network can increase its own card transactions because multihoming cardholde...

Fingerprinting is an essential tool to shun legal buyers of digital content from illegal redistribution. In fingerprinting schemes, the merchant embeds the buyer’s identity as a watermark into the content so that the merchant can retrieve the buyer’s identity when he encounters a redistributed copy. To prevent the merchant from dishonestly embedding the buyer’s identity multiple times, it is es...