Charles Sprenger and Joanna Stavins Abstract: Approximately half of credit card holders in the United States regularly carry unpaid credit card debt. These so‐called “revolvers” exhibit payment behavior that differs from that of those who repay their entire credit card balance every month. Previous literature has focused on the adoption of debit cards by people who carry credit card balances, ...

Theft of stored credit card information is an increasing threat to e-commerce. We propose a dynamic virtual credit card number scheme that reduces the damage caused by stolen credit card numbers. A user can use an existing credit card account to generate multiple virtual credit card numbers that are either usable for a single transaction or are tied with a particular merchant. We call the schem...

The Ripple credit network has emerged as a payment backbone with key advantages for financial institutions and the remittance industry. Its path-based IOweYou (IOU) settlements across different (crypto)currencies conceptually distinguishes the Ripple blockchain from cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin and altcoins), and makes it highly suitable to an orthogonal yet vast set of applications in the...

or two decades, economic and legal academics have speculated about the impact of the fees that merchants pay for credit card acceptance. Since all customers pay the same price, the theory goes, everyone pays for the benefits that go only to credit card users. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FRBB) policy paper written by economists Scott Schuh, Oz Shy, and Joanna Stavins entitled Who Ga...

Consumers’ ability to purchase goods and services from anywhere and at any time is a critical factor in the ubiquity of e-commerce. Credit cards enable a medium of exchange that facilitates the global e-commerce marketplace. Credit card providers’ and bank account service sites provide powerful tools for the individual to manage their credit card accounts, and allowing payment of monthly credit...

Since there is no concept of a session in HTTP, Web servers and browsers use cookies to capture information for subsequent communications on the Web, thus providing continuity and state across HTTP connections. Technically, cookies can be used to support electronic transactions on the Web, holding users' credit card information. However, it is insecure to store and transmit sensitive informatio...

Near field communication has enabled customers to put their credit cards into a smartphone and use the phone for credit card transaction. But EMV contactless payment allows unauthorized readers to access credit cards. Besides, in offline transaction, a merchant's reader cannot verify whether a card has been revoked. Therefore, we propose an EMV-compatible payment protocol to mitigate the transa...