Erik Stephen Ross

Open Transaction Network: Connecting Communities of Experience through Mobile Transactions

In order to understand the value of social information in the context of mobile commerce, we created the Open Transaction Network (OTN), a collaborative, social transaction system. OTN uses voluntarily contributed transactions to index personal and social experiences in the physical world and to form dynamic communities around purchases. We use mobile phones and Open Spaces as portals to facilitate sharing of transactions. Through real world deployment we investigate the design elements and analyze users’ tolerance to sharing such experiences. The sociability threshold, introduced as a measure of user’s willingness to share for different categories of products, is found to correlate with price. The system was deployed to over 20 users over a 5 month period to allow the participants to share their in-store purchases. The analysis of empirical data shows that second degree connections are valuable for obtaining recommendations.

Concrete budgeting: A financial planning tool for intertemporal tradeoffs and just-in-time information

Existing budgeting tools take only the short-term view; here, we present an interface for scenario-based, long-term planning. Our work is grounded in recent empirical advances in behavioral economics. We present a system architecture and suggest contributions and directions for future research.