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...

This paper establishes if using a comment card provides a reliable form of feedback regarding customer satisfaction in hotels. This exploratory study was conducted at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel-Dubai, UAE. They are a convenient way for guests to complain, make suggestions and praise. Managers use this input to make quick fixes and comfort distraught guests. The trouble is that hotels depend on co...

The longitudinal study of the most sophisticated decision support system (DSS) for the management of debit accounts provides new answers to the question of conformity in French banking. In 2003, the analysis of 45 observations and qualitative interviews showed that the advisor maintains his free appreciation of risk. However, even if conformity does not exist, the results on the modification ra...

Herein, a methodology for analysing an area’s broad tourism product is presented. In particular, after theoretically approaching the issue of Destination Management, and the issues of marketing and planning geographical sections, the use of a Destination Card is proposed for applications relevant to areas’ strategic analyses. The aforementioned card is a result of the combination of tools for l...

In the U.S., the share of payments made “electronically” – with credit cards, debit cards and direct payments – grew from 25 percent in 1995 to over 50 percent in 2002 (BIS, 2004). This paper frames this aggregate change in the context of individual behavior. Family level data indicate that the share of families using or holding these instruments also increased over the same period. The persona...

The application of real options analysis to information technology investment evaluation problems recently has been proposed in the IS literature by Dos Santos (1991), Kambil et al. (1993), Kumar (1996), Chalasani et al. (1997), and Taudes (1998). The research reported on in this paper illustrates the value of applying real options analysis in the context of a case study involving the deploymen...

Public authorities have recently intervened in the U.S. payment card industry to address controversy over the growing fees charged to merchants for processing debit card transactions. The interventions, by Congress and by the Department of Justice, aimed to give merchants and consumers some relief from the high fees and to promote competition within the payment card industry. The new regulation...

For many goods and services, such as cellular-phone service and debit-card transactions, the price of the next unit of service depends on past usage. As a result, consumers who are inattentive to their past usage but are aware of contract terms may remain uncertain about the price of the next unit. I develop a model of inattentive consumption, derive equilibrium pricing when consumers are inatt...

Background. Drain inclusion inside the gastric pouch is rare and can represent an important source of morbidity and mortality associated with laparocopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (LRYGBP). These leaks can become chronic and challenging. Surgical options are often unsuccessful. We present the endoscopic management of four patients with drain inclusion. Patients. All four obese morbidly patients ...

Research on wishful thinking suggests that desires bias adult’s probability judgments. Previous research has yet to explore if this extends to young children. In Experiment 1, 260 4and 6-year-olds in the U.S. and Peru played a card game, where selecting a desirable card was unlikely. In Experiment 2, 200 4to 6-year-old children were shown a bag of plastic eggs; a few contained desirable prizes....