• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.213-226
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• 2005

Adverse selection is a heavily scrutinized subject within the financial intermediary industry. Consensus is reached regarding its effect on the loan interest rate. Despite the similar features of financial service offered by the credit card, we still have controversy regarding credit card interest rate on how is adverse selection incurred with the change of interest rate. Thus, this paper explores how does the adverse selection, if ever, take place and affect the credit card interest rate. Information asymmetry regarding the credit card users' type represented by the default probability is assumed. The users are assumed to be rational in that they want to minimize the per unit dollar expense associated with the commercial transaction and financing between the two typical payment methods, cash and credit card. Suppliers, i.e. credit card companies, would like to maximize their profit and would be better off with more pervasive use of credit cards over the cash. Then we could show that the increasing credit card interest rate is subject to the adverse selection, sharing the same tenet with that of the bank loan interest rate proposed by Stiglitz and Weiss. Hence the current theory predicts that credit card market also suffers from adverse selection with increasing interest rate.