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...

The U.S. payment market has attracted increasing attention from technology firms and their investors seeking to capitalize on mobile and cloud technologies and the growing trend in consumer adoption of smartphones. Although consumers in the United States largely have not adopted mobile payments, merchants believe these technologies will address some current barriers to the use of mobile payment...

PURPOSE The cost implications associated with offloading outpatient surgery from hospitals to ambulatory surgery centers and the physician office remain poorly defined. Therefore, we determined whether payments for outpatient surgery vary by location of care. MATERIALS AND METHODS Using national Medicare claims from 1998 to 2006, we identified elderly patients who underwent 1 of 22 common out...

Payment to Medicare Advantage (MA) plans was fundamentally altered in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA). MA plans now operate under a new formula for county-level payment area benchmarks, and in 2012 began receiving quality-based bonus payments. The Medicare Advantage Quality Bonus Payment Demonstration expanded the bonus payments to most MA plans through 2014; howeve...

Out-of-pocket (OOP) payments are the principal means of financing health care throughout much of Asia. We estimate the magnitude and distribution of OOP payments for health care in fourteen countries and territories accounting for 81% of the Asian population. We focus on payments that are catastrophic, in the sense of severely disrupting household living standards, and approximate such payments...

BACKGROUND Direct out-of-pocket payments for health care are recognised as limiting access to health care services and also endangering the welfare of households. In Uganda, such payments comprise a large portion of total health financing. This study assesses the catastrophic and impoverishing impact of paying for health care out-of-pocket in Uganda. METHODS Using data from the Uganda Nationa...

The paper tackles the problem of making direct payments in the EU countries more equal. Two sets of indices and their evolution are being presented: payment rates per product and per hectare of eligible area. The need of redistribution of direct payments is being stressed, followed by the discussion on different scenarios of distribution among Member States. The model finally accepted by the EU...

A simple characterization of the equilibrium conditions required to compute Vickrey payments in the Combinatorial Allocation Problem leads to an ascending price Generalized Vickrey Auction. The ascending auction, iBundle Extend & Adjust (iBEA), maintains non-linear and perhaps non-anonymous prices on bundles of items, and terminates with the efficient allocation and the Vickrey payments in ex p...

Mobile payments (m-payments) are increasingly being adopted by organisations as a new way of doing business in the 21 century. During the last few years, the use of m-payments as a new payment channel has resulted in an increase in the volume of literature dedicated to the topic. For this reason, this paper presents the findings of a review of literature aimed at identifying the key research th...