There is an increasing demand for digital crypto-currencies to be more secure and robust meet the following business requirements: (1) low transaction fees (2) privacy of users. Nowadays, Bitcoin gaining traction wide adoption. Many well-known businesses have begun accepting bitcoins as a means making financial payments. However, susceptibility networks information propagation delay, increases ...

It is a pleasure to be with you this morning and to add my welcome to this very important conference on the payments system being hosted by the Federal Reserve's Payments System Development Committee. The name of the conference--The Payments System in Transition--captures not only the state of the financial services that we all use to make payments, but also the expectations of many payments sy...

Background: Households’ financial protection against health payments and expenditures and equity in utilization of health care services are of the most important tasks of governments. This study aims to measuring equity in household’s health care payments according to fairness in financial contribution (FFC) and Kakwani indices in Tehran-Iran, 2013. Methods: This cross-sectional study was c...

BACKGROUND Markets for physician services are becoming increasingly concentrated, with many areas being dominated by a few groups. Antitrust authorities are concerned that increasing concentration will lead to inappropriately high payments for physician services from private insurers. The authors examined the association between market concentration and private insurer payments for anesthesia s...

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 ...

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...

Utility theories for the de ̄nitions of cooperative games and associated solution concepts are discussed. A game with side payments needs the assumptions of transferable utility and side payments. We discuss the axioms for the transferable utility assumption and also the role of side payments for various solution concepts. We also discuss games without side payments, which do not require the ass...