During my gap year working at Teya (formerly known as SaltPay), I learned a lot about card payments and how they are regulated in Europe. This inspired a final paper in my Writing and Rhetoric class at Stanford, where I point to a market failure that exists in card networks: when card schemes (Visa, Mastercard...) compete with one another for banks to issue their cards, merchants participating on the other side of the network end up paying higher fees.
This paper was awarded an honorable mention in the 2022 Hoover Institution Distinguished Undergraduate Essay Competition.
Full PDF here.