One important requirement of electronic cash systems is the anonymity of customers. Unconditional anonymity is also very well suited to support criminals in blackmailing. Maitland and Boyd proposed at ICICS 2001 an offline electronic cash system based on a group signature scheme. Their scheme cannot be used to solve blackmailing and other anonymity problems such as money laundering and illegal ...

With the advent of e-commerce, opportunities have arisen for students to obtain course textbooks from sources other than the traditional campus bookstore(s). This research seeks to understand the factors motivating students to select e-commerce or traditional vendors for their textbook purchases. It surveys student perceptions of e-commerce textbook purchases from the perspectives of product pe...

Storable products allow consumers to time their purchases to exploit price fluctuations. It has been documented that during promotions consumers buy more. The additional purchases are potentially intended not only for current use, but to be stockpiled for future consumption. This paper discusses the predictions of a consumer inventory model and reviews the available evidence. We then discuss th...

The purpose of this study is to compare the performances of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Multinomial Probit (MNP) approaches in modeling the choice decision within fast moving consumer goods sector. To do this, based on 2597 toothpaste purchases of a panel sample of 404 households, choice models are built and their performances are compared on the 861 purchases of a test sample of 135 h...

Sufficient conditions for the long run non-superneutrality of money are established in a neoclassical growth model with a labor-leisure choice. Money is held to satisfy a cash-in-advance constraint on consumption purchases. Production requires capital and labor while period utility depends on consumption and leisure. Sufficient conditions for increased money growth to reduce output in the long ...

Motor vehicles play a central role in the modern American lifestyle. The vast majority of workers travel to work by private vehicle. Motor vehicles are one of the most widely owned assets, with more than 85 percent of U.S. households owning one or more vehicles in 1992. Costs related to vehicles—vehicle purchases, operating expenses and repairs, and insurance—account for a sizable part of the t...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the costs of satisfying MyPyramid fruit and vegetable guidelines, with a focus on whether low-income households can bear these costs. DESIGN Descriptive analysis of the 2008 National Consumer Panel with information on the food purchases of 64,440 households across the contiguous United States was used to analyze the cost of fruits and vegetables. Costs per MyPyramid cup-...

We propose a simple model of financial crises, which may be useful for the unified analysis of macro and financial policies implemented during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. A financial crisis is modeled as a disappearance of inside money due to the lemon problem à la Akerlof (1970), in a simplistic variant of Lucas and Stokey’s (1987) Cash-in-Advance economy, where both cash and capital stock...