If we imagine Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in a developing nation in 1998 and awakening today, it’s likely that he’d be fascinated with and surprised by mobile phones. When Rip went to sleep, only a few hundred million people had access to mobile phones, and most of them lived in wealthy nations. A decade later, the ITU (Touré, 2008) sees 4.1 billion mobile phone accounts, ...

there is disagreement about the antiquity of glassmaking industry in shām. some trace it back to the post-islamic era and regard it as being inspired by the roman artisans who had been employed for constructing buildings in the umayyad reign. others, however, believe that this industry is traced back to centuries before islam entered shām and was restored and developed by the support of the cal...

Trade prospered in absence of law in California during the 1830s and 1840s. Merchants, through intermerchant trade and the partnerships they organized to buy goods abroad, played a central role in trade. This article examines the privateorder institution that facilitated intermerchant trade. The hypothesis is that a particular type of private-order institution, a coalition, governed agency rela...

In this paper a novel payment system for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) commerce transactions is presented. It implements electronic cash-based transactions, between buyers and merchants. In this system, financial institutions become partners in the e-commerce transaction, conducted by their customers over the Internet. The innovation of the proposed system is the reduction of the involvement of the financ...

This paper develops a minimal model of an economy with intermediation. The focus is on the endogenous choice of homogeneous agents between specializing as producers or as merchants. Merchants operate alongside a decentralized search market and provide immediacy in exchange. Endogenous choice requires that agents be free to move between the two occupations at any time. Using only this condition,...

Unequal Giving: Monetary Gifts to Children Across Countries and Over Time Money parents give their adult children may be important for the financing of a child’s education or a first home, relaxing binding credit constraints or responding to a transitory income shock. Financial transfers however, may extend economic disparities across generations if the wealthy transfer considerable resources t...

We present an architecture for global customization of web content, by which a web site can customize content for each visitor based on the activities undertaken by the same user on other, unrelated sites. Our architecture distinguishes itself in the privacy mechanisms it provides: each user controls what information a merchant can learn about her activities at other merchants, and each merchan...

In this article, we investigate why merchants accept credit cards for payment despite the relatively high cost of processing these types of transactions. A two-period model is constructed to determine under what conditions a credit card equilibrium would exist. The results of the model indicate that when the cost of funds is not too high and when the merchant’s profit margin is sufficiently hig...

Some social groups are higher in socioeconomic status than others and the former tend to be favored over the latter. The present research investigated whether observing group differences in wealth alone can directly cause children to prefer wealthier groups. In Experiment 1, 4-5-year-old children developed a preference for a wealthy novel group over a less wealthy group. In Experiment 2, childr...

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...