The role of virtual humans in a range of health scenarios, including therapy and counselling, are being explored. To help people in managing their emotional health this research project novelly investigates the value of a virtual practitioner to deliver the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). EFT, also known as Tapping Method, is a kind of psychological acupressure technique to optimize emotiona...

We investigate a game of delegated portfolio management such as hedge funds featuring risk-neutrality, hidden types, and hidden actions. We show that capital gain tax plays the decisive role in solving the incentive problem. We characterize the constrained optimal fee scheme and capital gain tax rate; the fee after taxation must be linear and affected by gains and losses in a low-powered and sy...

Introduction Across the country, school districts rely on a combination of local, state, and federal funds to operate schools – with local and state funds making up over 90 percent of all public school funding.i State and federal funds are distributed to districts on the basis of funding formulas. State funding formulas have a significant impact on the amount of funding that districts receive b...

The performance of country exchange-traded funds and closed-end funds is investigated over the 2002 to 2011 period. Operating characteristics (i.e., expense ratios and portfolio turnover) and investment results (i.e., return, risk, and risk-adjusted return) are studied for investment funds with at least ten years of data. We find that although exchange-traded funds have significantly lower expe...

This work discusses investment funds in Croatia, with a particular emphasis on openend investment funds. After a short review of the development of the funds, the perception of the funds is analysed, as are the trends in total assets and in average yields. The degree of concentration of open-end investment funds is shown with statistical measures of concentration (the Gini Coefficient, the Lore...

Since the “explosion” of the number of on-line transactions, many IT researchers have concentrated their efforts to offer solutions to the security demanded by operations involving financial data. This paper proposes a novel system which employs biometry to secure electronic transactions by using the dynamic signature as the single individual characteristic to be verified before the processing ...

Research in steganalysis is motivated by the concern that communications associated with illicit activity could be hidden in seemingly innocent electronic transactions. By developing defensive tools before steganographic communication grows, computer security professionals will be better prepared for the threat. This paper proposes a computational immune system (CIS) approach to blind steganogr...

Conditional e-cash or conditional e-payments have been introduced by Shi et al. as the means for enabling electronic payments to be based on the outcome of a certain condition not known in advance. In this framework, a payer obtains an electronic coin and can transfer it to a payee under a certain condition. Once the outcome of the condition is known, if it was favorable to the payee, the payee...

On September 25, 2001, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia sponsored a workshop on innovations in small dollar payments. The moderated discussion was led by Richard Corl, an entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in the electronic payments industry. From his perspective as a director of Ecount, a small dollar payments innovator, Corl described a range of chall...