Bob Chakravorti was a guest lecture in Heather Russell's graduate law FinTech Program at Boston University Law School. Bob discussed the potential roles for cryptocurrencies and blockchains in finance.
The provision of retail payment services is complex with many participants engaging in a series of interrelated bilateral transactions and subject to large economies of scale and scope along with strong adoption, usage and network externalities. This makes sound public policy difficult. We focus on three types of market interventions...
Bolt and Chakravorti discuss different types of market interventions by public authorities in retail payment markets. They concentrate on three types of market interventions. First, they analyze the impact of removing pricing restrictions placed on merchants that prevent them from setting different prices based on the payment instrument used to...
Bob Chakravorti discusses surcharging and honor-all-cards rules for payment cards. Generally, merchants charge the same price regardless of the type of payment instrument used to make purchases. In many jurisdictions, merchants are not allowed to add a surcharge for payment card transactions because of legal (some states in the U.S...
Credit cards provide benefits to consumers and merchants not provided by other payment instruments as evidenced by their explosive growth in the number and value of transactions over the last 20 years. Recently, credit card networks have come under scrutiny from regulators and antitrust authorities around the world. The costs...
Over the last decade, consumers have tripled their use of credit cards as more merchants have increased their acceptance of them. This increase suggests that incentives in today’s marketplace favor greater credit card use by consumers and acceptance by merchants. In this paper, Chakravorti and Shah study the set of...
Chakravorti investigates payments system reforms begun by the Bank of Mexico in 1994. The goals of these reforms are to reduce the amount of uncollateralized intraday credit extended by the Bank of Mexico (previously unlimited), to promote a market-based allocation of intraday credit for interbank payments, and to move large-value...