Context Aware Mobile Payment System for Inducing Behavior Change
Tetsuo Yamabe (PM), Vili Lehdonvirta, Hitoshi Ito, Hayuru Soma, Hiroaki Kimura
Economic incentives are a powerful way of shaping consumer behavior toward more commercially efficient and environmentally sustainable patterns. In this paper, we explore the idea of combining pervasive computing techniques with electronic payment systems to create activity-based micro-incentives. Users who consume additional resources, e.g., by occupying an air-conditioned space instead of a regular one, are charged additional micro-payments. In an alternative approach, consumers who choose to save resources are rewarded with micro-rebates on the price of a service. As a result, the cost of using a service corresponds more closely to the resources used, allowing market mechanisms to allocate resources efficiently. A key challenge is designing incentive mechanisms that alter consumer behavior in the desired way. We introduce four incentive models and present evaluation results suggesting that consumers make different decisions depending on which model is used.
