More than a billion people worldwide lack access to electricity, and even a $15 solar lamp is beyond the financial reach for many of them. Yet businesses have found a way to reach this very-low-income market through rent-to-own programs that combine incremental payments with technology to monitor and lock out non-paying customers. A new paper by Asst. Prof. Jose Guajardo is the first to analyze how usage and payment behavior interact in rent-to-own business models and what works when serving customers in the developing world who have no savings and no credit history. The paper was recently published in Production and Operations Management.