| Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing | 
 enlarge | Authors: David Evans, Richard Schmalensee
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy Used: $3.50
You Save: $18.45 (84%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 1105462
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 392
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0262550377
Dewey Decimal Number: 332
EAN: 9780262550376
ASIN: 0262550377
Publication Date: August 28, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: same ISBN / cover; 2000 printing; name stamp inside; some wear / cover wear, crease on cover; text clean / very good
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
Since Diners Club issued its first charge cards in 1950, payment cards?credit, debit, and charge cards?have revolutionized how and whenwe pay for goods and services. In Paying with Plastic, 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 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Great Overview November 5, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you work in the payments, credit card or finance industry this book is great. It has a very easy to read history about credit cards, who knew Diners Club invented the category in the 50's. But more importantly is how the industry is moving forward and progressing.
Overall, this is a book you read if you need to, but I can't imagine anyone outside the industry reading it. You would have to be the most intellecually curious person in the world if you read this cause you were interested in how credit cards work.
Great book!! January 4, 2006
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I loved this book and how the author talks about the fine points of credit cards and how American consumers got hooked into it. A terrific read and it is money well spent, although FREE shipping would have been nice!
 What's old will be new again October 24, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Paying with Plastic first edition has been revamped, rewritten and repositioned here with edition number two.
Most important, Paying with Plastic "2.0" addresses new developments of online payment processing. The authors correctly begin to question the requirement of a merchant set top box for reading "antiquated magnetic stripes".
"Old is new" item #1. Frank McNamara's Diners Club platform would cost about $50,000 to set up today. What's the next mutiny of merchants?
Old is new item #2. Sears starting up Discover and getting to more merchants tha American Express -all within 2 years. Moore's law (doubling within time) would suggest the next Discover would ramp up in less time.
Old is new #3. Industries in decline, lobby best. The payment industry's recently raised interchange rates. Does technology cost more?! No, but growth is stagnant.
Old is new #4. Whoops, John Reed (ex-ceo of Citibank) pulled their Visa membership (p14) and moved the Mastercard logo to the back. Why?! Pull the entire Citi into a closed loop - Citi wanted to be like Amex and Discover. There will be more banks doing this like Chase (Octogon) or MBNA (PayPass).
Old is new #5. Wal-mart as a bank. See Sears above in #2. Wal-marts pays fees to V/MC/D/Amex but they'd rather charge fees and lend money. Why just make $2.00 on the VCR when you can make $10 on the financing. By the way, I like the payment system name, "Wallycard"... just kidding.
A remarkable accomplishment July 11, 2005
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is a very difficult and ambitious task to write a book about an industry combining indispensable facts and history, fundamental business aspects and subtle economic insights. Yet this is precisely what the authors have done for credit cards, the digital quantum leap in the evolution of payment instruments. It is a very rewarding and fun read, providing the equivalent of a comprehensive 3D animated view of the organization of credit card companies (not-for-profit associations like Visa or for-profit firms like American Express) and of the complex ecosystem that surrounds them: banks, merchants, cardholders, regulators, ATM networks, etc.
And the "lens" of "multi-sided platforms" that Evans and Schmalensee use to conduct their analysis turns out to be so appealing and insightful that one wonders how economists, policy-makers, business people and even casual observers managed to make any sense of this industry before.
Highly Recommended! May 9, 2005
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
In this history of payment cards, David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee provide an amazingly lucid account of a couple of unusual business models: the "two-sided platform," which in the use of payment cards means walking a tightrope between the interests of merchants and consumers; and the "co-opetitive," in which the bank members of MasterCard and Visa cooperate in developing industry practices while competing for business. The authors, who are both former Visa consultants, sound like your favorite college professors - up to date and extremely sophisticated, yet friendly and anecdotal (at one point, they describe a Shell gas station near MIT to make a point about competition among cards). They typically begin chapters with easily understood notions from which they methodically build complex structures of ideas and information. Another virtue of the book is its concreteness - although that occasionally devolves into repetitiveness - starting with an explanation involving electronic signals and following the paper path of what happens when you hand your credit, debit or charge card to a cashier. The authors even consider the design and manufacture of the cards themselves. We recommend this book as essential reading for those in the banking or payment card industries; and it's not a bad idea for card users to read it - which these days means you...and just about everyone else.
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