Abstract:This paper establishes a pricing game to study ATM service fees in both one-way access and two-way access, and compares the differences of service fees between independent and collective pricing scheme. The model yields some new insights on ATM pricing which contribute to explaining the pricing practices in China. It shows that, in an independent pricing scheme, banks or independent ATM deployers (IAD) would set the interchange fee in a plus pricing pattern based on average withdrawal costs. Among them, the unit transport cost of cardholder makes up the basis for the plus term. Regardless of the independent or collective pricing scheme, large banks are prone to set higher foreign fees using the unit transport cost of cardholder as an additive term, but the cost difference between home and agent bank as a subtracted term. The collective-setting interchange fee abides by marginal cost pricing rule and is socially efficient in the one-way access. As a comparison, the collective-setting interchange fee abides by Ramsey pricing principle in the two-way access, i. e. it amounts to the average cost of all banks. Notably, the collective pricing scheme lowers the two-way interchange fee as long as the unit transport cost of cardholders is high enough.