The paper offers a roadmap to the current economic thinking concerning interchange fees. After describing the fundamental externalities inherent in payment systems and analysing merchant resistance to interchange fee increases and the associations' determination of this fee, it derives the externalities' implications for welfare analysis. It then discusses whether consumer surplus or social welfare is the proper benchmark for regulatory purposes. Finally, it offers a critique of the current regulatory approach, and concludes with a call for more novel and innovative thinking about how to reconcile regulators' concerns and the industry legitimate desire to perform its balancing act.
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Jean-Charles Rochet Author-Email: rochet@cict.fr Author-Workplace-Name: IDEI, University of Toulouse & Jean Tirole Author-Email: tirole@cict.fr Author-Workplace-Name: IDEI, University of Toulouse, 2006.
"Two-Sided Markets: A Progress Report,"
RAND Journal of Economics,
The RAND Corporation, vol. 37(3), pages 645-667, Autumn.
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