This paper investigates the competition between payment card issuers in an artificial payment card market. In the market we model the interactions between consumers, merchants and competing card issuers and obtain the optimal pricing structure for card issuers. We allow card issuers to charge consumers and merchants with fixed fees, provide net benefits from card usage and engage in marketing a...

We consider optimal pricing by a profit-maximizing platform running a dynamic search and matching market. Buyers and sellers enter in cohorts over time, meet and bargain under private information. The optimal centralized mechanism, which involves posting a bid-ask spread, can be decentralized through participation fees charged by the intermediary to both sides. The sum of buyers’ and sellers’ f...

Recent decisions by the Spanish national competition authority (TDC) mandate payment systems to include only two costs when setting their domestic multilateral interchange fees (MIF): a fixed processing cost and a variable cost for the risk of fraud. This artificial lowering of MIFs will not lower consumer prices, because of uncompetitive retailing; but it will however lead to higher cardholder...

To understand the pricing and performance of private equity (PE), we analyze the incomplete-markets portfolio choice problem facing a risk-averse limited partner (LP) investing in liquid stocks and bonds along with an illiquid PE investment. A general partner (GP) manages the PE asset and generates alpha on it and charges management and performance fees via carried interest in return. Our compl...

This study examines how lawsuits against auditors affect the audit pricing and client acceptance strategies of both the audit offices responsible for the failed audit and other audit offices of the same audit firm. We find that non-litigation offices of litigation audit firms decrease their fees following the filing of a lawsuit. However, audit offices involved in litigation increase their audi...