Date of Conferral

12-8-2025

Date of Award

December 2025

Degree

Doctor of Public Administration (D.P.A)

School

Management

Advisor

Walter McCollum

Abstract

High fees and structural limitations in traditional payment systems prevent the viable use of global micropayments, creating barriers to innovation and restricting financial participation for individuals and organisations reliant on low-value digital transactions; stakeholders in digital commerce, financial-technology development, and payment-infrastructure organisations care about this problem because percentage-based fees render transactions under $5 economically unviable and suppress usage-based business models. Grounded in transaction cost economics, the purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to examine differences in effective fee percentage and absolute fee in USD across five payment providers using 55,000 archival transactions dated May 2025 (11,000 each from PayPal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Bitcoin SV blockchain records) retrieved from provider logs and public blockchain records. Data were analysed with descriptive statistics and MANOVA, yielding a significant multivariate effect of provider, Wilks’ Λ = .3776, F(8, 109988) = 8625.14, p < .001, partial η² = .622 (Pillai’s Trace = .6230). Average effective fees were PayPal 22.69%, Stripe 10.97%, Visa 4.96%, Mastercard 3.64%, and Bitcoin SV 0.19%, with PayPal and Stripe frequently exceeding 30% for sub-$1 payments versus Bitcoin SV’s minimum $0.0000309. A key recommendation is for business leaders to adopt a low-fee on-chain micropayment architecture capable of sub-cent settlement for high-volume, low-value digital payments. The implications for positive social change include the potential for low-income users, unbanked populations, and small digital-service providers to gain affordable micropayment access and participate more fully in digital marketplaces.

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