of the Dissertation.................................................................................... ii Preface: Minority Merchants: Agents of Neighborhood Change...................................................... iv Acknowledgements............................................................................................ xiii Table of

An off-line electronic cash scheme is proposed that is suitable for small payments. The approach is innovative, in that each coin may be efficiently verified by the same or different merchants during payment. The scheme relies on a batch signature technique to efficiently sign and verify individually spent coins; coins may also be deposited in batch manner. The scheme outlined differs considera...

A fundamental aspect of any open payment system is the interchange fee that is paid from the merchant’s bank to the cardholder’s bank. Using a model in which there is partial participation by heterogeneous consumers and merchants, this paper characterizes the output maximizing, profit maximizing and welfare maximizing level of such an interchange fee. It examines how the optimal level of the fe...

Recently, online shopping has become a popular trade model. Merchants can put their goods information on a website built by the Internet platforms, such as Yahoo and eBay. This trade model facilitates customers to browse what goods the merchants sell. But the employed types of payment are not fair. In this paper, a new trade model for online shopping is proposed. This model adopts 3G mobile pho...

Merchants are competing to offer the use of mobile payment to encourage shopping. many mobile payment systems were made available in various locations worldwide; however, they have various drawbacks. This paper proposes a new mobile payment system that discusses the main drawbacks of these systems, namely security and speed of transaction. The proposal is featured by being simple to use by cust...

This paper provides a new theory for two-sided payment card markets. Adopting payment cards requires consumers and merchants to pay a fixed cost, but yields a lower marginal cost of making payments. Analyzing adoption and usage externalities among heterogeneous consumers and merchants, our theory derives the equilibrium card adoption and usage pattern consistent with empirical evidence. Our ana...

This paper presents a model of competing payment schemes. Unlike previous work on generic twosided markets, the model allows for the fact that in a payment system one type of user (merchants) competes to attract users on the other side of the market (consumers who may use cards for purchases). It analyzes how competition between card associations affects the choice of interchange fees, and thus...