Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons^™

Designing Payment Models For The Poor, Bhavani Shanker Uppari, Sasa Zorc

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Several basic services, such as energy, clean water and cooking gas, are currently out of reach for millions of people living in poverty. There has been an emergence of private firms that offer these services by, for example, selling solar home systems or clean cooking packages with remote lockout capabilities. These firms deploy a pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) model in which consumers are given the flexibility to manage the amount and frequency of their payments based on their own erratic cash flows. However, because a firm under this model cannot observe how much money the consumers have, they can pay less to …