People will happily take way less interest on their money if you can just prove it isn't fake.
March 18, 2026
Original Paper
Payment Fraud and Welfare 
SSRN · 6340238
The Takeaway
By modeling e-commerce fraud, researchers found that the 'recognizability' of a currency is more valuable than its interest rate. People are so sensitive to the risk of being cheated that they will accept a significantly lower return on their assets just to use a system with slightly better fraud detection.
From the abstract
This paper studies the welfare consequences of imperfect payment recognizability in a monetary search model. Sellers observe a noisy signal of payment authenticity and choose acceptance thresholds that balance fraud losses against the rejection of legitimate payments. The information structure maps directly to the ROC--AUC statistic used to evaluate fraud detection systems, linking modern payment technology to monetary theory. Calibrating the model to e-commerce payment fraud statistics, seller