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Conference Paper
Online payments: challenges and opportunities
Journal Article
Personal on-line payments
The swift growth of e-commerce and the Internet has led to the development of a new form of electronic funds transfer?the personal on-line payment?that uses web and e-mail technologies to initiate and confirm payments. This article describes this payment instrument and the trends that have given rise to it. The authors explain that personal on-line payment systems are already providing a convenient alternative to checks, money orders, and cash, and may replace credit cards for some small-scale retail e-commerce. However, issues such as the interoperability of diverse systems and the systems? ...
Working Paper
Optimal policy with probabilistic equilibrium selection
This paper introduces an approach to the study of optimal government policy in economies characterized by a coordination problem and multiple equilibria. Such models are often criticized as not being useful for policy analysis because they fail to assign a unique prediction to each possible policy choice. We employ a selection mechanism that assigns, ex ante, a probability to each equilibrium indicating how likely it is to obtain. With this, the optimal policy is well defined. We show how such a mechanism can be derived as the natural result of an adaptive learning process. This approach ...
Journal Article
The financial performance of pure play Internet banks
In theory, banks that conduct all their business over the Internet will have low overhead expenses. If these saving materialize, Internet banks could use them to fuel fast growth while still earning normal profits. This article analyzes a small sample of "pure lay" Internet banks launched during the late 1990s. Compared with young branching banks, these young Internet banks have low physical overhead and grow fast--but they earn low profits due to high labor expenses, low noninterest income, and low core deposits.
Discussion Paper
Innovation at the point of sale
On February 27, 2003, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia sponsored a conference to examine a variety of new payments options available to consumers paying for goods and services at the point of sale. The conference included diverse representation from the payments industry and Federal Reserve staff. ; Conference presentations and discussions focused on current and prospective payments innovations and their implications for payments providers, merchants, and consumers. The need for alignment among these three parties as an essential condition for the success ...
Journal Article
The diffusion of electronic business in the United States
The authors provide a recent account of the diffusion of electronic business in the U.S. economy using new data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. They document the extent of the diffusion in three main sectors of the economy: retail, services, and manufacturing. For manufacturing, they also analyze plants' patterns of adoption of several Internet-based processes and conclude with a look at the future of the Internet's diffusion and a prospect for further data collection by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Journal Article
Observations: test driving the Internet
Shopping for a new car over the Internet.
Conference Paper
Electronic bill payment: challenges and opportunities
Journal Article
Clicking with dollars : how consumers can pay for purchases from E-tailers
The Internet is often referred to as the world?s largest mall. About half of all adults in the United States have made a purchase online. Worldwide, online shopping is considerably greater?and cybershopping is expected to continue to grow as more households become connected to the Internet and as improvements in mobile telecommunication technology allow wireless Internet access anywhere and anytime.> A byproduct of the dramatic increase in online shopping has been a heightened demand for convenient and secure online payment methods. Consumers make almost all their online purchases with credit ...