1/11/2000
There's no turning back: Payment cards - credit, debit and charge cards - have created a sea change in how we think about and spend money. This book, written by the Dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT (Schmalensee) and the senior vice president of National Economics Research Associates (Evans), offers a thorough yet accessible analysis of the complex journey of the payment card from its early chicken-or-egg obstacles to mass acceptance. The book also illustrates how and why this evolution has broken all the rules of conventional economic principles. "It is by no means implausible," the authors write, "that the twenty-dollar bill will go the way of wampum before the middle of the next century."