Assignment 7 - Kayla Fang (kkf6)

Living in an apartment with three other who are also my friends, sharing amenities, utilities, rent, and space, creates a community based on a lot of trust. Many responsibilities are important to the physical and emotional well-being of our apartment like buying toilet paper, cleaning up the kitchen, taking out the trash/recycling, and planning events in our shared physical and acoustic spaces.

We want a reputation system to keep track of how much we contribute to maintaining our environment and also how much we degrade our environment with negative behaviors, such as being loud, messy, and free-riding. Trust matters a lot because we do not keep track of each others’ behaviors—for example, the huge mess in the middle of the living room could be created by anybody. We trust each other to pay rent, contribute to the electricity bill, and take care of each others’ possessions that are in the common space.

Naturally, many people are inherently lazy so sometimes it can be hard to make sure everybody does their part. One thing that every single person in my apartment likes is Sour Patch Kids candy. A possible rewards system could involve having a large supply of Sour Patch Kids and every person can have a small cylinder container (like a thermometer) next to the door with her name on it—whenever we find out about something constructive and positive they do, we can add Sour Patch Kids to the bag, and if we are unhappy with their mess, we can take out Sour Patch Kids. This way, we can each gauge how satisfied our roommates in general are with our participation. Every week we can get together (on Sundays or something) and eat all of the Sour Patch Kids in our containers and start afresh. This way, we also have a regular meeting in which we can acknowledge each other’s contributions and bloopers. Resnick discusses the challenges of eliciting, distributing, and aggregating feedback in his paper on Reputation Systems, all of which the SPK system attempts to address: the “fun” aspect of candy should encourage my roommates to participate regularly,; distribution is easy because our feedback is in a container next to our front door; lastly, aggregation is simply the total volume of Sour Patch Kids in the container as an aggregation of everybody’s feedback.

This system can be manipulated by each person by adding extra Sour Patch Kids to her own container to make it look like the general approval is higher than it is so that the other roommates will think that she is doing what she is supposed to.