سیستم های پرداخت مطلوب کارتی

This paper presents a model of a card payment system to address the pricing and rules that govern such systems. It evaluates the social optimality of privately set interchange fees and the adoption of a rule by payment systems to prevent merchants surcharging for card transactions using two extremes of merchant pricing—monopolistic pricing and perfect competition. Both types of merchant pricing constrain the ability of card schemes to use interchange fees and the no-surcharge rule in anticompetitive ways, although for quite different reasons. The positive role of the no-surcharge rule in preventing excessive merchant surcharging is also highlighted.