One of themost challenging problems in self-organizedmobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), which consist of autonomous and self-interested nodes, is to stimulate the nodes to cooperate in routing and packet forwarding. In this paper, we propose a novel credit-based cooperation mechanism that utilizes hash chains on messages to defend against cheating by the nodes. We show that it imposes a low workl...

Reference pricing (RP) theories predict different outcomes when reference prices are fixed (exogenous) versus being a function of market prices (MPs) (endogenous). Exogenous RP results in MPs at both high-price and low-price firms converging towards the reference price from above and below, respectively. Endogenous RP results in MPs at both high-price and low-price firms decreasing, with low-pr...

Most central banks have some type of broad responsibility for oversight of the payments system. Often this responsibility is coupled with regulatory powers relating to high-value payments. In Australia, however, the responsibility runs much broader than this, encompassing the efficiency and competitiveness of the payments system as a whole, including retail payments. This responsibility was giv...

OBJECTIVE  To examine the association between payments made by the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals to physicians and prescribing by physicians within hospital referral regions. DESIGN  Cross sectional analysis of 2013 and 2014 Open Payments and Medicare Part D prescribing data for two classes of commonly prescribed, commonly marketed drugs: oral anticoagulants and non-insulin diabetes drugs,...

BACKGROUND The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center introduced the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative in 2011 as 1 strategy to encourage healthcare organizations and clinicians to improve healthcare delivery for patients, both when they are in the hospital and after they are discharged. Mercy Health Saint Mary's, a large urban academic medical center...

We present a protocol for payments across payment systems. It enables secure transfers between ledgers and allows anyone with accounts on two ledgers to create a connection between them. Ledger-provided escrow removes the need to trust these connectors. Connections can be composed to enable payments between any ledgers, creating a global graph of liquidity or Interledger. Unlike previous approa...

Trends and determinants of marriage payments have rarely been examined at the population level, despite their plausible implications for the welfare of family and the distribution of wealth across families and generations. In this study, we analyze population-based data from the Vietnam Study of Family Change to examine prevalence, directions, and magnitude of marriage payments in Vietnam from ...

Pricing should speed up the substitution of low cost electronic payments for expensive paper-based transactions and cash. But by how much? Norway has explicitly priced individual payment transactions and rapidly shifted to electronic payments while the Netherlands has experienced the same shift without direct pricing. Controlling for differences between countries, we estimate the incremental ef...

CONTEXT Recent legislation in 5 states and the District of Columbia mandated state disclosure of payments made to physicians by pharmaceutical companies. In 2 of these states, Vermont and Minnesota, payment disclosures are publicly available. OBJECTIVES To determine the accessibility and quality of the data available in Vermont and Minnesota and to describe the prevalence and magnitude of dis...