SeriesFusion
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Practical Magic  /  Economics

People will happily take way less interest on their money if you can just prove it isn't fake.

By modeling e-commerce fraud, researchers found that the 'recognizability' of a currency is more valuable than its interest rate. People are so sensitive to the risk of being cheated that they will accept a significantly lower return on their assets just to use a system with slightly better fraud detection.

Original Paper

Payment Fraud and Welfare 

Qi Li

SSRN  ·  6340238

This paper studies the welfare consequences of imperfect payment recognizability in a monetary search model. Sellers observe a noisy signal of payment authenticity and choose acceptance thresholds that balance fraud losses against the rejection of legitimate payments. The information structure maps directly to the ROC--AUC statistic used to evaluate fraud detection systems, linking modern payment technology to monetary theory. Calibrating the model to e-commerce payment fraud statistics, seller