Manly Merchants

Merchants and ivory

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...

A model of merchants

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...

The Manly Art of Observation and Deduction

Mobile Payments: Merchants’ Perspectives

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...

Barter Economies and Centralized Merchants

This essay analyzes the circumstances under which a barter system based on merchants and centralized markets dominates an unstructured primitive barter system. For that purpose, we set up a spatial general equilibrium model where exchange is costly. In an unstructured barter system, as population increases, the transaction costs may become cumbersome and the cost of trade expansion surpasses it...