By crawling Meituan take-out merchant data, this paper studies the influence of e-commerce platform merchants’ reputation on consumer decision making. The empirical results show that based overall score merchants has a significant impact consumers’ purchase and then affects monthly sales volume merchants. At same time, brand have higher than ordinary merchants, series food safety guarantee meas...

During the middle ages, itinerant merchants traveling across Europe to trade at fairs, markets, and sea ports needed common ground rules to create trust and confidence for robust international trade. The differences among local, feudal, royal, and ecclesiastical law provided a significant degree of uncertainty and difficulty for merchants. Custom and practices evolved into a distinct body of la...

In 1958, Bank of America began operating the BankAmericard credit card system, the predecessor of Visa, as a unitary system. It performed both the issuing function (dealing with cardholders) and the acquiring function (dealing with merchants) itself. Similarly, it set the fees charged to both these customer classes—the annual fee, interest rate, late fees, and other fees charged to cardholders ...

We discuss and evaluate the incentives for vertical expansion and vertical mergers in the payments systems industry paying particular attention to the implications of the existence of network effects in this industry. We assess the incentives of merchants to extend vertically into payments systems, noting that this incentive is maximized when there is significant market power in payments system...

Managing customer relationships was easier in earlier times. Merchants knew their customers – the members of their households, what they generally bought, their likely future purchases, and their current and potential value as customers. This knowledge helped merchants create highly effective customer relationships. However, that close understanding of customers eroded as people became more mob...

This paper presents models that explain why merchants accept payment cards even when the fees they face exceed the transactional benefits they receive from a card transaction. Such merchant behaviors can be explained by competition among merchants and/or the effectiveness of the merchant’s card acceptance in shifting cardholders’ demand for goods upward. The prevalent assumption used in payment...

Abstract Wealthy citizens have influenced public debates and the political process in United States many ways, for example through donations or campaign finance. Philanthropy is viewed increasingly as another vehicle of more indirect elite influence. Although institutionally designed to stay above partisan fray, philanthropy has been politicized over last decades against backdrop growing polari...

In wealthy economies, the pharmaceutical IP system works tolerably well, especially when supported by generous government grants (such as the US National Institutes of Health) and tax subsidies (such as R&D tax credits and the Orphan Drug tax credit). In wealthy countries, access issues from IP-induced higher prices are ameliorated by government-subsidized insurance and other social mechanisms....