Differences in Quality of Life Estimates Using Rents and Home Values Quality of life differences across areas can be measured by differences in “real wages”, where real wages are computed as nominal wages adjusted for the cost of living. Computing cost of living differences involves several important issues, including how housing prices should be measured. Previous researchers typically have us...

This paper presents results of a user survey on conventional and electronic payment systems that was conducted with the aim to discover user attitudes towards their characteristic properties. While research, presented in the literature of the field suggests high importance of characteristics of electronic payment systems such as anonymity and efficiency, we have found that these characteristics...

Current payment methods, that are based on cash and magnetic strip cards, are either expensive to use, or they do not offer enough security for payments. Smart card based payment systems offer several benefits over currently used cash and magnetic strip cards. Building and delivering smart card based payments systems is not an easy task. It includes several risks and some of them are addressed ...

Previously proposed anonymous electronic payment systems have the drawback that the bank has to maintain large databases, which is a handicap for the realization of such systems. In this paper, we present a practical anonymous payment system that signiicantly reduces the size of such databases. It uses the concept of anonymous accounts and ooers anonymity as an add-on feature to existing EFTPOS...

Mixed payment systems have become a prominent alternative to paying physicians through fee-for-service and capitation. While theory shows mixed payment systems to be superior, causal effects on physicians' behavior when introducing mixed systems are not well understood empirically. We systematically analyze the influence of fee-for-service, capitation, and mixed payment systems on physicians' s...

We present a systematic treatment of the properties of digital payment systems. By properties, we mean that we abstract from internal details and only consider what kind of service the system offers its users, which may be people or other processes. In particular, the integrity properties are meant as a sketch of a general formal definition of payment systems, which can be filled in with modera...

GNU Taler is a new electronic online payment system which provides privacy for customers and accountability for merchants. It uses an exchange service to issue digital coins using blind signatures, and is thus not subject to the performance issues that plague Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus-based solutions. The focus of this paper is addressing the challenges payment systems face in the cont...

This thesis describes the design and the details of the preliminary implementation of Clearinghouse: a "per-call" payment framework for an interoperable, distributed object environment. Clearinghouse has two notable features. First, it has a paymethod abstraction layer which simultaneously supports multiple payment methods; in other words, Clearinghouse can be used for any payment method (e.g. ...

The mode of payment creates powerful incentives affecting provider behavior and the efficiency, equity and quality outcomes of health finance reforms. This article examines provider incentives as well as administrative costs, and institutional conditions for successful implementation associated with provider payment alternatives. The alternatives considered are budget reforms, capitation, fee-f...

The growing importance of electronic commerce has resulted in the birth of a plethora of different and incompatible payment systems. For business application writers this implies the need to understand the details of different mechanisms, to adapt the code as soon new payment schemes arrive and also to provide a way of finding a common mechanism for every transaction. In our work, we unify the ...