Great points. Honesty would become tricky if this became an actual company. In the short run, verification would be worked out by communication between the people exchanging donations and perhaps sharing donation receipts. In the long run, maybe the trading company could hire people to do this verification.
I was thinking surplus could be split 50-50. In a bigger market, I suppose surplus could be apportioned based on supply and demand, but it might still make sense to split 50-50 for the sake of fairness.
When I worked at a large charity, we sometimes had people request refunds because they misunderstood something, or changed their mind, or whatever. We always honored their requests, and I’d guess most other nonprofits do too (particularly if it was by credit card, because they can always report it as fraudulent and then their card company will take the money back from the charity anyway).
I think a dishonest person could game this by making the donation, providing the receipt, and then getting a refund from the charity.
I’ve been thinking about something like this as well—it does seem promising.
Figuring out how to clear a set of multiple transactions is actually an interesting problem. You need to:
Figure out how to allocate the surplus from trade
Figure out a set of transactions that optimizes both convenience and gift amount
Check that everyone is honest/resolve any disputes
Great points. Honesty would become tricky if this became an actual company. In the short run, verification would be worked out by communication between the people exchanging donations and perhaps sharing donation receipts. In the long run, maybe the trading company could hire people to do this verification.
I was thinking surplus could be split 50-50. In a bigger market, I suppose surplus could be apportioned based on supply and demand, but it might still make sense to split 50-50 for the sake of fairness.
When I worked at a large charity, we sometimes had people request refunds because they misunderstood something, or changed their mind, or whatever. We always honored their requests, and I’d guess most other nonprofits do too (particularly if it was by credit card, because they can always report it as fraudulent and then their card company will take the money back from the charity anyway).
I think a dishonest person could game this by making the donation, providing the receipt, and then getting a refund from the charity.