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The no‐surcharge rule and surcharging behaviours in credit card markets
Author(s) -
Tan Hongru,
Deng Zhongqi
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
australian economic papers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.351
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1467-8454
pISSN - 0004-900X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8454.12189
Subject(s) - credit card , payment , economics , welfare , wright , business , market economy , finance , engineering , systems engineering
We investigate the welfare implications of banning the no‐surcharge rule (NSR) in credit card markets. In particular, we introduce a governance mechanism alteration and merchants' heterogeneity into the model of Wright (2003). In doing so, we find two market forces exist in the transition of lifting the NSR. The first force is the classical double marginalisation because of merchants being able to deliberately impose a surcharge. The second force arises from a market structure change that merchants, who did not accept credit cards payments, do accept afterwards. Our model shows that the welfare implication hinges on the relative magnitudes of both market forces. More importantly, this article provides an explanation for the surcharging behaviours of merchants in Australia after the removal of the NSR in 2003, which have not been explained in the literature.