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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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Table of contents
Abstract
Reviews
Excerpt
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"This very readable book will appeal not only to policy makers and business executives,
but also to the theoretically inclined economist. Evans and Schmalensee provide a
rigorous analysis and deep insights about the credit card industry's fascinating
institutional features. Paying with Plastic considerably advances the state of our
knowledge and is a remarkable achievement."
-- Jean Tirole, Institut D'Economie Indutrielle,
France
For better or worse, most of us have at least one of the 720 million little plastic
cards that are used each year to complete $860 billion worth of purchases at 15 million
incredibly varied merchant locations throughout the world. This is a far cry from
the humble beginnings of these myriad credit, debit, and charge cards, which just
a few decades ago were generally a perk offered only to elite customers for the acquisition
of fine meals, hotel rooms, department-store goods, and oil-company products. They
are now so common and such an integral part of our economy, in fact, that few pay
them much mind--a situation that makes David Evans and Richard Schmalensee's Paying
with Plastic all the more interesting. Evans, senior vice president of National
Economics Research Associates, and Schmalensee, dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management,
meticulously trace the history of these cards from both the consumer and merchant
perspectives in this surprisingly appealing volume, which will prove enlightening
to anyone who ever wondered how plastic money works.
-- Howard Rothman
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