Current e-commerce practice enforces a customer to disclose her identify to the e-shop. The use of credit cards makes it straightforward for an e-shop to know the real identity of its customers. Although, there are some payment systems based on untraceable tokens, they are not as widely used as credit cards. Furthermore, even without buying anything, a customer is already disclosing some inform...

Credit card issuers face a choice when card data has been exposed in a data breach but has not yet been used for attempted fraud: reissue the cards or wait until fraud is attempted. This article empirically investigates the first-order public and private costs and benefits of each of these options. Based on extrapolations of the total number of credit card records exposed in data breaches, the ...

Between the end of the last recession in the first quarter of 1991 and the second quarter of 1997, consumer revolving credit outstanding, which includes consumer credit card debt, more than doubled—from $247 billion to $514 billion. The rapid rise of consumer debt, especially credit card debt, generated much discussion about its cause, sustainability, and implication despite the fact that credi...

Using data from multiple card issuers, we show that the most common penalty fee type incurred by credit holders, late payment fees, declines sharply over first few months of life. This phenomenon is wholly due to some consumers adopting automatic payments after a event, thereby insuring themselves against future fees. Nonadopters, who remain on manual-only payments, experience an unchanged high...

In this paper we present an attack which allows fraudulent transactions to be collected from EMV contactless credit and debit cards without the knowledge of the cardholder. The attack exploits a previously unreported vulnerability in EMV protocol, which allows EMV contactless cards to approve unlimited value transactions without the cardholder's PIN when the transaction is carried out in a fore...

We test whether a non-binding price ceiling may serve as a focal point for tacit collusion, using data from the credit card market during the 1980s. In our sample, most credit card issuers face a state-level interest rate ceiling, and well over half match their ceiling. We develop an empirical model that can separately identify the instance in which an issuer matches its ceiling because it is b...