Merchant Payment Steering: Evidence From the 2009 Bank of Canada Methods of Payment Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many retailers in Canada have noted the increasing burden of transaction costs, in particular the interchange fees due for every credit card transaction that they process.After the Competition Tribunal rejected in 2012 an application that might have granted retailers the right to surcharge credit cards, retailers may look for other solutions to avoid these fees.Discounting cash or debit card transactions has often been suggested as one solution since discounts are currently allowed in Canada.The model of merchant cost incorporates the consumers' choice based on the pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits of using cash, debit and credit cards.I estimate the choice model using data from the Bank of Canada's 2009 Methods of Payment Survey.Dr. Konstantinos Metaxoglou and Dr. Yanling Wang generously gave their time to sit on my committee.Their comments and suggestions helped me improve the thesis significantly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.032 | 0.110 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".