In this paper a novel electronic payment protocol suitable for “peer-to-peer” (P2P) networks is presented. It implements electronic cash-based transactions, between buyers and merchants. It is based on a bank account, though it can be easily extended and can be readily applied to other account payment models like debit cards. The proposed protocol is designed using Millicent’s main concept (scr...

With the unprecedented growth of the Internet, business -to-consumer (B2C) commerce has grown to vast proportions. However, after years of practice, how to promote consumers’ trust towards their storefronts is still the most critical challenge for B2C online merchants (Hoffman and Novak 1996, Jarvenpaa et al. 2000, Kovar et al. 2000). Presently, the main strategy for online B2C merchants is to ...

By crawling Meituan take-out merchant data, this paper studies the influence of e-commerce platform merchants’ reputation on consumer decision making. The empirical results show that based overall score merchants has a significant impact consumers’ purchase and then affects monthly sales volume merchants. At same time, brand have higher than ordinary merchants, series food safety guarantee meas...

During the middle ages, itinerant merchants traveling across Europe to trade at fairs, markets, and sea ports needed common ground rules to create trust and confidence for robust international trade. The differences among local, feudal, royal, and ecclesiastical law provided a significant degree of uncertainty and difficulty for merchants. Custom and practices evolved into a distinct body of la...

In 1958, Bank of America began operating the BankAmericard credit card system, the predecessor of Visa, as a unitary system. It performed both the issuing function (dealing with cardholders) and the acquiring function (dealing with merchants) itself. Similarly, it set the fees charged to both these customer classes—the annual fee, interest rate, late fees, and other fees charged to cardholders ...

We discuss and evaluate the incentives for vertical expansion and vertical mergers in the payments systems industry paying particular attention to the implications of the existence of network effects in this industry. We assess the incentives of merchants to extend vertically into payments systems, noting that this incentive is maximized when there is significant market power in payments system...

Managing customer relationships was easier in earlier times. Merchants knew their customers – the members of their households, what they generally bought, their likely future purchases, and their current and potential value as customers. This knowledge helped merchants create highly effective customer relationships. However, that close understanding of customers eroded as people became more mob...

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...

This paper examines the impact of the cashback mechanism on online merchants’ affiliate and pricing strategies. Through reimbursing a portion of the transactional amount to consumers in a form of cashback, merchants are able to practice seconddegree price discrimination. We develop an analytical framework which explicitly considers the implementation cost associated with the underlying promotio...