Showing posts with label barter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label barter. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Food trucks trade assigned spaces in Washington DC

D.C. food trucks look to new platform to swap spaces assigned in lottery

"It didn’t take long after D.C. started doling out parking spaces to the city’s food trucks that the D.C., Maryland and Virginia Food Truck Association hit on one unfailing principal of economics: Where one market pops up, a secondary market will surely follow.
Food truckers, after getting their assigned spaces in the city's mobile roadway vending zones each month, were frantically hitting up the association’s message board with requests to trade days. It made for way too many emails, and not a lot of successful trades.
So the DMVFTA decided to find a better way. Now, a few months later, the association is about to launch its very own digital trading platform on its website.
...
"Hoffman had a group of masters students who needed a final project. With her guidance, those students developed a proof-of-concept program that took into account the truckers’ preferences for trades and automatically assigned new slots. In the end, the program spits out a new schedule for assigned spots that can be submitted to the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, so they are able to enforce the assignments."

HT: Paul Milgrom

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Home exchanges

In the WSJ, a retired California couple discuss the (approaching three dozen) home exchanges they have done, bartering a stay at their San Diego condo for visits of a few weeks to a month all over the world, via two networks, homeexchange.com and homelink.org.

"Exchanging homes involves some negotiating. Your leverage depends on the desirability of the home you have to exchange. In the U.S., New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are favorites of international exchangers. After that, there is a second tier of cities, which includes San Diego.

"(One tricky area in negotiations: whether to exchange cars. Our preference is to rely on local transportation. Some cities, like Paris and London, have great public transportation. Unfortunately, San Diego doesn't, and our exchange partners feel strongly that we need to exchange cars. We've done so about half the time.)
...
"On each Internet site, we have a page with photos of our home, information about San Diego and ourselves, and details about when, where and with whom we want to exchange. Once we make contact with a potential partner, we discuss details of dates, number of people, transportation, etc. On average, an exchange takes about 20 emails and an occasional phone call to work out all the arrangements.
...
"We are often asked if we have any problems with our exchanges. We do. The biggest problem is cancellations. Since our first choice is to exchange with other older adults, unexpected medical problems can be an issue. With younger exchangers, you can encounter job or financial problems. In a few cases, my guess is that people cancel because they get a better offer—but they never admit that.

"We have had seven cancellations in connection with our 32 exchanges. Fortunately, all except one were early enough that we hadn't made plane reservations and could arrange alternative exchanges."

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Barter in a recession

In a Tight Holiday Season, Some Turn to Barter

"The proliferation of Web sites with names like Swap.com and SwapMamas have moved swaps from the home and the community center to online bazaars with millions of users. No industry figures exist on the number of for-profit startups, but officials at one of the largest, Swap.com, said they have over a million registered users and an inventory of 15 million items at any given time.

"ThredUP opened business in April as a clothing exchange site and expanded this month to toys. Mrs. Spitzer signed up as a member in August.
She said that she used to buy new clothes for her three children, all under age 7, every couple of months and then give them away as her children outgrew them. But after she joined ThredUP, she began viewing her children’s hand-me-downs as currency."

Swap.com and ThredUP charge a small fee for each trade ($1 and $5). I didn't see such a fee on SwapMamas, which also encourages people to offer their used goods as gifts when they don't find a coincidence of wants, and has a reputation system that is intended to make frequent givers also favored recipients of gifts.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Barter and illiquidity in Russia

The NY Times reports that in Russia, where rubles are getting scarce but prices are remaining sticky, there's a growing interest in barter exchanges:
Have Car, Need Briefs? In Russia, Barter Is Back .

"Advertisements are beginning to appear in newspapers and online, like one that offered “2,500,000 rubles’ worth of premium underwear for any automobile,” and another promising “lumber in Krasnoyarsk for food or medicine.” A crane manufacturer in Yekaterinburg is paying its debtors with excavators.
And one of Russia’s original commodities traders, German L. Sterligov, has rolled out a splashy “anti-crisis” initiative that he says will link long chains of enterprises in a worldwide barter system.
All this evokes a bit of déjà vu. In the mid-1990s, barter transactions in Russia accounted for an astonishing 50 percent of sales for midsize enterprises and 75 percent for large ones."
...
"Among the most upbeat of [the proponents of barter] is Mr. Sterligov, who, just as the credit crunch brought most business deals to a halt, shoveled $13 million into the Anti-Crisis Settlement and Commodity Center.
...He plans to use a computer database to create chains of six or seven enterprises having difficulty selling their products for cash, in which the last firm on the chain would pay the first in a single cash transaction.
It is the kind of multiparty barter that rose to prominence in the 1990s, when managers of factories across Russia devised complex barter chains to keep the maximum number of enterprises in business when none had cash to pay their bills. A computer, he said, can do the same job faster and more efficiently. "

Loyal followers of this blog will note the resemblance to some kinds of kidney exchange (most notably list exchange chains and altruistic donor chains).