Taxonomy of Payment Structures and Economic Incentive Schemes in Internet

Recently the study of economics of internet has emerged as an emerging field of study. The workstations being distributed across the network along with the users having varied interests has made this study very important from an information security and policy designing point of view. The main purpose of any framework design is to keep up with the security standards of confidentiality, integrity and availability without being an overburden on the deployer. The same goes for the users, the Quality of Service (QoS) should be in accordance with what they pay for. The concept of "tragedy of commons" plays an important role in distributing the limited resources of the internet. In this, the users because of their own self-interest destroy the collective interest of a community sharing the resource. A sustainable pricing strategy is the one which is able to cater to the competitive advantage of different network providers offering the same set of services but on varied prices. A pricing mechanism will help in differentiating the services offered to the users, but another important task is of fixing the incentives. The pricing strategy plays a very important role in facilitating varied kinds of QoS requirements. Security professionals have realized that while designing any security mechanism it is vital to keep in consideration the "theory of mind" which explains the way the attackers and benign users take decision to deceive of remain loyal to the system. So, studying the incentive and payment structure from economic point of view is important.