The broadcast marketplace : Designing a more efficient local marketplace for goods and services

Abstract

Today's online marketplaces for goods and services are imperfect. Participants make an initial post expressing their intention to buy or sell an object, but all offers on this post are private. These offers can be seen as expressions of other participants' intentions to buy or sell the same item. What if these offers were as public as the initial post? Would this decrease market friction and enable participants to close transactions more efficiently? What if every post and offer were tagged with a location enabling a real-time proximal picture of supply and demand? In this thesis, we explore a different kind of marketplace, a broadcast marketplace, where a combination of public post, proximal awareness and mobility decrease the friction of information flow and facilitate efficiency. This thesis explores the design, implementation and deployment of a system which enables users to efficiently view, understand and act upon this proximal picture of supply and demand. To test the viability of the broadcast marketplace we deployed Peddl, an implementation of the idea, in the MIT and Cambridge, MA community. Over the course of the trial we collected data on 5,839 unique visitors and 805 registered users, who made 726 posts totaling $234,913 in value. From this data we show that the additional transparency of supply and demand afforded by our design results in increased marketplace activity.