Public authorities have recently intervened in the U.S. payment card industry to address controversy over the growing fees charged to merchants for processing debit card transactions. The interventions, by Congress and by the Department of Justice, aimed to give merchants and consumers some relief from the high fees and to promote competition within the payment card industry. The new regulation...

Two African states, Tanzania and Zambia, are seeking to change the ban on trade in ivory at the meeting next month of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in Qatar. But the countries face a battle, because other states, such as Kenya and Mali, are strongly opposed to any change and have been lobbying the EU in Brussels this month to support a block to any chan...

This paper introduces an artificial payment card market in which we model the interactions between consumers, merchants and competing card issuers with the aim of determining the optimal pricing structure for card issuers. We allow card issuers to charge consumers and merchants with fixed fees, provide net benefits from card usage and engage in marketing activities. The demand by consumers and ...

We surveyed 470 Amazon.com merchants regarding their experience, knowledge and perceptions of digitally-signed email. Some of these merchants (93) had been receiving digitally-signed VAT invoices from Amazon for more than a year. Respondents attitudes were measured as to the role of signed and/or sealed mail in e-commerce. Among our findings: 25.2% of merchants thought that receipts sent by onl...

The U.S. payment market has attracted increasing attention from technology firms and their investors seeking to capitalize on mobile and cloud technologies and the growing trend in consumer adoption of smartphones. Although consumers in the United States largely have not adopted mobile payments, merchants believe these technologies will address some current barriers to the use of mobile payment...

the absence of merchants played a significant role in the movement of national oil industry and had undeniable effects on the failure of this movement in 1953. the focus of this study is to find out the reasons why merchants were absent in the great oil national movement. in this study, document analysis was used to respond to the research question. the finding shows that the merchants especial...

I propose a simple model of merchants who are specialized in buying and selling a homogenous good. Facing the same frictions as in the buyer-seller direct trades, merchants can make profits with an ability to buy and sell many units of the good. They set the price to compete in the market and provide buyers with a strong likelihood of obtaining the good. This paper establishes a turnover equili...