Enhanced Community Currency Trading through Transaction Group Formation

A community currency is local money that is issued by local governments or non-profit organizations (NPOs) to support social services. The purpose of introducing community currencies is to regenerate communities by fostering mutual aid among community members. Community members can use community currencies as a medium of value to pay for things such as voluntary services. Usually, though, the demand for and supply of services is unbalanced. An extreme imbalance leads to a transaction slowdown because a shortage of the community currency occurs in each community. To alleviate this problem, we propose a community currency trading method which is an intermediary process to link participants based on an integral process of group forming and social learning. This method coordinates the flow of service exchange, improves members´ sense of community, and increases the volume of transactions. We have evaluated the proposed method through multi-agent simulation