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This paper analyses market competition between two different types of credit card platforms: not-for-profit associations and proprietary systems. The main focus is on the role of the interchange fee set by not-forprofit platforms. We describe the sterilising role of the interchange fee: when the interchange fee is set so as to maximise the sum of issuers' and acquirers' profits, the equilibrium values of platforms' profits, of the sum of the fees charged by each platform and their market shares are independent of the competitive conditions within the not-for-profit platform and are affected by the strength of inter-platform competition. We also show that the imposition of a ban on the setting of the interchange fee has ambiguous effects on the profit of the proprietary system.

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A startup ecosystem is a dynamic environment in which several actors, such as investors, venture capitalists, angels, and facilitators, are the protagonists of a complex interplay. Most of these interactions involve the flow of capital whose size and direction help to map the intricate system of relationships. This quantity is also considered a good proxy of economic success. Given the complexity of such systems, it would be more desirable to supplement this information with other informative features, and a natural choice is to adopt mathematical measures. In this work, we will specifically consider network centrality measures, borrowed by network theory. In particular, using the largest publicly available dataset for startups, the Crunchbase dataset, we show how centrality measures highlight the importance of particular players, such as angels and accelerators, whose role could be underestimated by focusing on collected funds only. We also provide a quantitative criterion to establish which firms should be considered strategic and rank them. Finally, as funding is a widespread measure for success in economic settings, we investigate to which extent this measure is in agreement with network metrics; the model accurately forecasts which firms will receive the highest funding in future years.