Spending Programs:A Tool for Flexible Micropayments

摘要

Micropayments are electronic payments of small amount. Given their low value,the cost of the corresponding electronic transactions should also be kept low. Current micropayment schemes allow a regular amount of money withdrawn froma bank to be split into fixed-value coupons, each of which is used for one micropayment. A more flexible mechanism is proposed in this paepr, whereby coupons of variable value can be generated by a spending program without increasing the transaction cost. Moreover, the spending program allows one of several alternative ways of splitting the amount withdrawn into re-usable coupons to be selected in real-time.