طرح پرداخت الکترونیکی مبتنی بر انگیزه برای انجام معاملات با محتوای دیجیتالی از طریق اینترنت

Digital content transactions through e-commerce will grow tremendous in the coming years. Well-designed electronic payment schemes and high-quality digital contents are two critical successful factors. This paper proposes an incentive-based electronic payment scheme, which can ensure both important properties of fair exchange and customer anonymity in e-commerce transactions and enhance authors’ motivation to create digital contents. The proposed payment scheme is based on cryptographic techniques. Besides, it adopts a mechanism called “the apportionment contract of sales revenue”, which records payees’ apportionment amount. The bank can immediately apportion the sales revenue according to this contract when customers complete payments. By scrupulous analyses, the proposed payment scheme can achieve fair exchange, customer anonymity, and payment security. This paper also compares the proposed payment scheme to related schemes. The comparison result shows that the proposed payment scheme has the best characteristics on the following viewpoints: incentive-based payment, fair exchange, customer anonymity, the denomination of payment token, and the number of payment token for a transaction

Digital contents are commercial products that are available in digital form and can be transmitted over the Internet. Because more and more people purchase digital contents through e-commerce transactions, we believe that the number of digital content transactions through e-commerce will grow tremendously. Under this circumstance, well-designed electronic payment schemes and high-quality digital contents are two critical successful factors for digital content transactions through the Internet. The well-designed electronic payment scheme can be constructed by cryptographic techniques to ensure fair exchange and customer anonymity. Fair exchange and customer anonymity are two important properties of e-commerce transactions (Ray et al., 2005; Zhang et al., 2006 and Zhang et al., 2003). Fair exchange ensures that either both or neither a customer or a merchant involved in an e-commerce transaction obtain the other's item. In the electronic environment a participant does not always has a physically identifiable location. After treating another party unfairly, a participant can simply vanish without trace. Consequently, participants are reluctant to trust each other. Because of this lack of trust, electronic payment schemes should be carefully designed to prevent unfair dealings. Customer anonymity ensures that the real identity of any customer is not revealed during transactions. Anonymity is essential to protect personal information. A research report conducted by eMarketer pointed out that approximately one-third of US Internet users over 14 years old were unwilling to adopt online transaction in 2005. They were concerned about the payment security and their personal information (Grau, 2006). High-quality digital contents need a lot of authors having motivation to create. The authors’ motivation will be weakened because of customers’ misbehaviors. Therefore, an appropriate method that can keep or enhance authors’ motivation to create high-quality digital contents is needful. Motivation is a process of seeking a goal and by moving toward that goal adjusting authors’ mental and physical activities. Motivation results from incentives. An incentive is an external stimulus that interacts with authors’ internal needs and potential interests to motivate seeking (McMahon and McMahon, 1986). Pay is frequently used as a motivator as it can easily be differentiated and computed, linked clearly and visibly to desired performance and is generally a valued reward (Beardwell and Holden, 1997). Further, reward is time-sensitive for authors. Motivational value will increases when the timing of the delivery of the rewards closely approximates the demonstration of behavior, the completion of an assignment, or the achievement of a result (Henderson, 1994). Advocates of reinforcement theory also believe that the magnitude of the subject's motivation to response can be shaped by manipulating reinforcement schedules, e.g. fixed interval, fixed ratio, variable interval or variable ratio (Muchinsky, 1993). Yukl and Latham (1975) and Yukl et al. (1976) compare the effectiveness of various schedules of reinforcement. They found that employees paid on a “ratio schedule” were significantly more productive. Later, Pritchard et al. (1980) confirmed that ratio schedules were more effective than interval schedules. Reinforcement theory is premised on rewarding desired behavior. The stronger is the link between the behavior and the reward, the greater is the probability of behavior (Muchinsky, 1993). According to above literatures, we can conclude that the shorter is the settlement of payment in digital content transactions, the higher is the incentive to authors of digital contents. Authors will obtain more incentive to improve their motivation on creating digital contents by means of shortening the time period of apportioning sales revenue, even immediate apportionment according to the ratio decided beforehand by all payees including authors and merchants. This is a new thinking in e-payment schemes. Traditionally, the apportionment of sales revenue among payees including sellers, publishers, and authors, is a long process in publishing. The author can obtain deserved profits after a period of time, e.g. 1 month or longer. Certainly, it is infeasible to apportion sales revenue immediately when customers pay the money in traditional payment scheme because this method increases a lot of processing costs. However, when physical products are digitized, e.g. images, audios, and videos, and sold by e-commerce transaction and electronic payment, it is feasible to apportion sales revenue immediately due to the processing capability of information systems. Besides, because these digital contents are created by one or more authors, sales revenues should be apportioned among multiple payees including authors and merchants. Therefore, an electronic payment scheme should support the apportionment of sales revenue directly to authors for incentive purpose, without the intermediaries such as the merchant. Actually, this is a kind of multiple payees’ electronic payment scheme, but to our knowledge it has seldom been proposed in the literature. On the basis of above discussions, the objective and contribution of this paper is to propose a new electronic payment scheme that fulfills fair exchange and customer anonymity for participants of e-commerce and incentive purpose for authors. Through this new payment scheme, customers can purchase digital contents under the fair and secure e-commerce platform, and authors can obtain deserved profits immediately when customers purchase digital contents. Thus, the purposed payment scheme can promote customers’ desires to purchase digital contents and enhance authors’ motivation to create high-quality products. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews literatures related to multiple payees’ electronic payment schemes and cryptographic techniques. Section 3 describes the details of the proposed payment scheme including system framework and system processes. Section 4 evaluates the proposed payment scheme through three viewpoints: fair exchange, customer anonymity and payment security. This paper also compares the proposed payment scheme to related schemes in order to find out its advantages and disadvantages; and further, it analyzes the efficiency of the proposed payment scheme. Finally, conclusions and future works are given in Section 5.

Digital content transactions through e-commerce will grow tremendous in the coming years. Well-designed electronic payment schemes and high-quality digital contents are two critical successful factors. A well-designed electronic payment scheme must ensure fair exchange and customer anonymity on e-commerce transactions. High-quality digital contents need a lot of authors having motivation to create. Therefore, an appropriate method, which can keep or enhance authors’ motivation is indispensable. This paper proposed an incentive-based electronic payment scheme, which can ensure both important properties of fair exchange and customer anonymity and encourage authors’ motivation to create digital contents by apportioning sales revenues immediately to payees when customers complete payments. Actually, it is a kind of multiple payees’ electronic payment scheme. Nevertheless, the multiple payees’ electronic payment scheme has seldom been proposed in the literature. The proposed payment scheme is based on Cao et al.'s (2005) partially blind signature electronic cash, multisignature (Schneier, 1996) and Fan et al.'s (2006) fair transaction protocol. Besides, it adopts a mechanism called the apportionment contract of sales revenue, which records all payees’ apportionment amount. The bank can apportion the sales revenue according to this contract when customers complete payments. By scrupulous analyses, the proposed payment scheme can achieve fair exchange, customer anonymous, and payment security. This paper also compares the proposed payment scheme to related schemes including Huang et al.'s (2000) scheme and Fan et al.'s (2006) scheme. The comparison result shows that the proposed payment scheme has the best characteristics on the following viewpoints: incentive-based payment, fair exchange, customer anonymity, the denomination of payment token, and the number of payment token for a transaction. Besides, this paper thinks that the efficiency of the proposed payment scheme is acceptable through efficiency analyses. Therefore, this scheme is well-designed and has significant potential to flourish digital content transactions because it can keep customer anonymity and encourage authors’ motivation to create high-quality digital contents because it immediately apportions sales revenue to payees. The proposed payment scheme at this time is in its early stage. In the future, we will focus on the following topics. 1. In order to evaluate the system performance of the proposed payment scheme, a prototype must be implemented. According to Nah's research (2004), the user's waiting time for an interactive web is approximately 2 s. The main purpose of the system prototype is to measure whether the system performance is acceptable or not. 2. We will formally analyze the proposed payment scheme using model checking, e.g. Ray and Ray (2000), to ensure that the proposed payment scheme is really fair during digital content transactions. 3. The number of merchants and banks should be expanded more than one in the system framework. Therefore, authors can entrust their creations to several merchants for selling and customers can withdraw electronic cash from their preferred banks. Consequently, the proposed payment scheme will be more feasible in the real world. 4. This paper integrated existing cryptographic techniques to show that a new concept, the incentive-based e-payment scheme, is feasible while it is implemented in the real world. Although this paper thinks that the efficiency of the proposed payment scheme is acceptable through efficiency analyses, it is still necessary to improve the efficiency of the previous techniques, e.g. replacing asymmetric cryptosystems with symmetric cryptosystems. This is an important future work such that the new payment scheme will be more efficient in practice.