'MASTerful' Matchmaking in Service Transactions: Inferred Abilities, Needs and Interests versus Activity Histories

Timebanking is a growing type of peer-to-peer service exchange, but is hampered by the effort of finding good transaction partners. We seek to reduce this effort by using a Matching Algorithm for Service Transactions (MAST). MAST matches transaction partners in terms of similarity of interests and complementarity of abilities and needs. We present an experiment involving data and participants from a real timebanking network, that evaluates the acceptability of MAST, and shows that such an algorithm can retrieve matches that are subjectively better than matches based on matching the category of people's historical offers or requests to the category of a current transaction request.

[1]  Massimo Zancanaro,et al.  Towards collaborative communities: a preliminary study on exchange of goods and services in local contexts , 2014, NordiCHI.

[2]  Ed Collom,et al.  Community Currency in the United States: The Social Environments in Which it Emerges and Survives , 2005 .

[3]  Robert Biswas-Diener,et al.  Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth , 2008 .

[4]  Tao Li,et al.  MEET: a generalized framework for reciprocal recommender systems , 2012, CIKM.

[5]  Gill Seyfang,et al.  Tackling social exclusion with community currencies: Learning from LETS to time banks , 2002 .

[6]  G. Seyfang.  Time banks: rewarding community self-help in the inner city? , 2004 .

[7]  Chad M. Kimmel.  Equal Time, Equal Value: Community Currencies and Time Banking in the US , 2015 .

[8]  Robin I. M. Dunbar.  Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates , 1992 .

[9]  Tim Weitzel,et al.  Matching People and Jobs: A Bilateral Recommendation Approach , 2006, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06).

[10]  John M. Carroll,et al.  It's Time There Was an App for That Too: A Usability Study of Mobile Timebanking , 2015, Int. J. Mob. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[11]  Ed Collom,et al.  Equal Time, Equal Value: Building Healthier Communities through Time Banking , 2011 .

[12]  R. Horton,et al.  Is actual similarity necessary for attraction? A meta-analysis of actual and perceived similarity , 2008 .

[13]  Starr Roxanne Hiltz,et al.  Making Social Matching Context-Aware: Design Concepts and Open Challenges , 2015, CHI.

[14]  Ed Collom,et al.  Time Banking and Health: The Role of a Community Currency Organization in Enhancing Well-Being , 2011, Health promotion practice.

[15]  Gill Seyfang,et al.  The Time of our Lives: Using Time Banking for Neighbourhood Renewal and Community Capacity Building , 2002 .

[16]  S. Post,et al.  Altruism, happiness, and health: it’s good to be good , 2005, International journal of behavioral medicine.

[17]  R. Likert.  “Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes, A” , 2022, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[18]  R. Basselier,et al.  The Rise of the Sharing Economy , 2023, BCP Business & Management.

[19]  John M. Carroll,et al.  Towards community-centered support for peer-to-peer service exchange: rethinking the timebanking metaphor , 2014, CHI.

[20]  Edgar S. Cahn,et al.  No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative , 2004 .

[21]  Maryam Fazel-Zarandi,et al.  Expert recommendation based on social drivers, social network analysis, and semantic data representation , 2011, HetRec '11.

[22]  Xiongcai Cai,et al.  People Recommendation Based on Aggregated Bidirectional Intentions in Social Network Site , 2010, PKAW.

[23]  M. Seligman.  Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment , 2002 .

[24]  Lucie K. Ozanne,et al.  LEARNING TO EXCHANGE TIME: BENEFITS AND OBSTACLES TO TIME BANKING , 2010 .

[25]  Robert D. Putnam,et al.  Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community , 2000, CSCW '00.

[26]  Noel Longhurst,et al.  Growing green money? Mapping community currencies for sustainable development , 2013 .

[27]  Victoria Bellotti,et al.  Why Users Disintermediate Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces , 2017, CHI.

[28]  Michael J. Muller,et al.  Make new friends, but keep the old: recommending people on social networking sites , 2009, CHI.

[29]  John M. Carroll,et al.  Random acts of kindness: The intelligent and context-aware future of reciprocal altruism and community collaboration , 2013, 2013 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS).

[30]  Sihem Amer-Yahia,et al.  Relevance and ranking in online dating systems , 2010, SIGIR.

[31]  Judy Kay,et al.  RECON: a reciprocal recommender for online dating , 2010, RecSys '10.

[32]  Nicholas Barr,et al.  Service credits: a new currency for the welfare state , 1986 .

[33]  Debbie Richards,et al.  Expertise Recommendation: A Two-Way Knowledge Communication Channel , 2008, Fourth International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (ICAS'08).

[34]  Andrew Leyshon,et al.  Bridges Into Work? An Evaluation of Local Exchange Trading Schemes , 2001 .

[35]  Gordon I. McCalla,et al.  User Modelling in I-Help: What, Why, When and How , 2001, User Modeling.

[36]  Tara Matthews,et al.  Asking the right person: supporting expertise selection in the enterprise , 2012, CHI.

[37]  Gill Seyfang,et al.  ‘With a little help from my friends.’ Evaluating time banks as a tool for community self-help , 2003 .

[38]  Amiram D Vinokur,et al.  Providing Social Support May Be More Beneficial Than Receiving It , 2003, Psychological science.

[39]  M. Kenward,et al.  An Introduction to the Bootstrap , 2007 .

[40]  David W. McDonald,et al.  Social matching: A framework and research agenda , 2005, TCHI.

[41]  John M. Carroll,et al.  Unequal Time for Unequal Value: Implications of Differing Motivations for Participation in Timebanking , 2015, CHI.

[42]  R. Trivers.  The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism , 1971, The Quarterly Review of Biology.

[43]  Marcos R. S. Borges,et al.  An environment to support the discovery of potential partners in a research group , 2013, Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD).

[44]  D. T. Regan,et al.  Effects of a favor and liking on compliance , 1971 .

[45]  Andrew Leyshon,et al.  Bridges into Work? An Evaluation of Local Exchange and Trading Schemes (LETS) , 2001 .