A fair network payment protocol plays an important role in electronic commerce. The fairness concept in payments can be illustrated as that two parties (e.g. customers and merchants) exchange the electronic items (e.g. electronic money and goods) with each other in a fair manner that no one can gain advantage over the other even if there are malicious actions during exchanging process. In the p...

Electronic payment (e-payment) has been widely applied to electronic commerce and has especially attracted a large number of mobile users. However, current solutions often focus on protecting users’ money security without concerning the issue of users’ privacy leakage. In this paper, we propose AEP-M, a practical anonymous e-payment scheme specifically designed for mobile devices using TrustZon...

A simple but nontrivial class of the quantum strategies in buyingselling games is presented. The player moves are a rational buying and an unconditional selling. The possibility of gaining extremal profits in such the games is considered. The entangled merchants hypothesis is proposed. 1 Projective geometry approach to profits Half thousand years ago Fra Luca Pacioli, a teacher of Leonardo da V...

We examine online affiliate marketing programs in which merchants oversee thousands of affiliates they have never met. Some merchants hire outside specialists to set and enforce policies for affiliates, while other merchants ask their ordinary marketing staff to perform these functions. For clear violations of applicable rules, we find that outside specialists are most effective at excluding th...

In recent years, the growth of Mobile Computing, Electronic Commerce and Mobile Electronic Commerce has created a new concept of Mobile Electronic Marketing. New marketing models are being explored and used by small businesses and merchants to target mobile users in ever-changing ad hoc environments. Utilization of network infrastructure like hotspots networks can assist these small businesses ...

Reciprocity and reputation are powerful tools for encouraging cooperation on a broad scale. Here, we highlight a potential side effect of these social phenomena: exacerbating economic inequality. In two novel economic games, we manipulated the amount of money with which participants were endowed and then gave them the opportunity to share resources with others. We found that people reciprocated...

We explore the size and structure of prizes intended to promote private development of orbital tourist vehicles. While inspired by the Ansari X-Prize, we argue that prizes to spur orbital tourism development must be much larger and structured to reward continued development, rather than a few flights. Mechanisms to promote development of extremely reliable vehicles are also discussed. This pape...