Network externalities: the catch-22 of retail payments innovations

William P. Osterberg and James Thomson

Economic Commentary, 1998, issue Feb

Abstract: An investigation of one of the reasons why electronic payments have not yet supplanted cash and checks in retail transactions: Consumers willingness to use an innovation depends on the number of merchants who have already adopted it, and merchants willingness to invest in the innovation depends on the number of consumers who are already using it.

Keywords: Smart cards; Payment systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/4515/item/627676 Full Text (text/html)
https://www.clevelandfed.org/-/media/project/cleve ... -innovations-pdf.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcec:y:1998:i:feb15

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Commentary from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().