Nowadays, an in-app payment mechanism is offered in most existing mobile payment solutions. However, current solutions are not flexible and impose certain restrictions: users are limited to predefined payment options and merchants need to adapt their payment mechanisms to each payment provider they use. Ideally mobile payments should be as flexible as possible to be able to target various marke...

BACKGROUND In 2004, a community-based health insurance scheme (CBI) was introduced in Nouna health district, Burkina Faso. Since its inception, coverage has remained low and dropout rates high. One important reason for low coverage and high dropout is that health workers do not support the CBI scheme because they are dissatisfied with the provider payment mechanism of the CBI. METHODS A discr...

The impossibility result by Jehiel and Moldovanu says that in a setting with interdependent valuations, any efficient and ex-post incentive compatible mechanism must be a constant mechanism. Mezzetti circumvents this problem by designing a two stage mechanism where the decision of allocation and payment are split over the two stages. This mechanism is elegant, however keeps a major weakness. In...

With the development of mobile network technology and mobile commerce application, mobile payment is becoming more and more important to assist mobile users to participate in the mobile commerce. Service reliability, security authtification, payment mobility is the core improblem, which should be solve with some flexible and secure measures. After deep studying traditional payment methods in el...

A combinatorial auction mechanism consists of an allocation rule that defines the allocation of goods for each agent, and a payment rule that defines the payment of each winner. There have been several studies on characterizing strategyproof allocation rules. In particular, a condition called weakmonotonicity has been identified as a full characterization of strategy-proof allocation rules. Mor...

The basic objective of this work is to construct an efficient and secure mechanism for mobile commerce applying the concept of financial cryptography and secure multi-party computation. The mechanism (MCM) is defined by various types of elements: a group of agents or players, actions, a finite set of inputs of each agent, a finite set of outcomes as defined by output function, a set of objectiv...

In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex-post regret, we are able to adapt techniques of statistical machine learning to the design of payment rules. This computational approach to mechanism design is applicable ...