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Evans, David S., and Richard Schmalensee. Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing.
2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005 (1999).
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Over the course of history there have been four major innovations in how people pay
for things: metallic coins in ancient times, checks in the Middle Ages, paper money
in modern times, and now payment cards. Since Diners Club issued its first charge
cards in 1950, payment cards--credit, debit, and charge cards--have revolutionized
how and when we pay for goods and services. In 1998 U.S. consumers had more than
720 million payment cards, which they could use to pay for goods and services at
more than 4 million merchant locations in the United States and another 11 million
in other countries.
David Evans and Richard Schmalensee provide a nontechnical distillation of their
years of research on the economic, technological, and institutional forces that have
shaped the payment card industry. They show how competition works in an industry
that does not neatly fit any of the standard economic models. They describe how the
entrepreneurs in this industry solved the chicken-and-egg problem: merchants will
not take cards if few consumers use them, and consumers will not use cards if few
merchants take them. They also describe how the payment card companies such as MasterCard
and Visa have developed complex systems for coordinating transactions among their
thousands of bank members and millions of cardholders and accepting merchants. Evans
and Schmalensee also describe recent developments in the industry and consider its
likely evolution.
