Variable selection for payment in social networks: Introducing the Hy-index

The rapid growth of social networks has led many companies to use mobile payment systems as business sales tools. As these platforms have an increasing acceptance among consumers, the main goal of this research is to analyze the individuals' use intention of these systems in a social network environment. The data used were collected after performing an experiment using the Zong Payment tool. The paper performs a comparative analysis of previous variable selection algorithms with a new hybrid approach: the Hy-index. As the results show, the use of the new index allows experts to obtain more information from the data available, giving them the chance to rank the variables and take more or less of them into consideration, depending on their experience.