Barter - Mechanism Design of A Market-incented Wisdom Exchange for Organizations and Communities

We are exploring the design and creation of information markets with a goal of bringing an electronic, distributed market to a community or an organization to enhance knowledge sharing, innovation creation, and productivity. We apply innovative market mechanisms to construct incentives while still encouraging pro-social behaviors. A key advantage of this study will be a direct appeal to information economic theories and market principles on information markets design. A web-based software platform called Barter is developed and deployed at several university sites. User data have been collected and analyzed to test the effectiveness of an information market and its various forces. In this paper, we focus on presenting the framework design of an information market, and demonstrating why such market architecture provides a long-term sustainable incentive structure to an organization and its members. We also present in this paper key findings we have learned through system deployment.