Smoothing Away the Stagnation Problem of Community Currencies with "Customized Community"Based on Satisfaction Prediction by Neural Network

Abstract

Every community, no matter how money poor, has a wealth of abilities and capability to stimulate the local economy. From this point, the idea of community currency (CC) emerged. This new type of currency was proposed as a tool to achieve sustainable development in the local economy. We learned that creating a CC was not enough to energize the local economy without addressing the stagnation problem. Thus, in the current research, we proposed a new framework or sequence of steps to build a “customized community” where the needs of members were met with the offered market to solve the stagnation problem. In this study we used real data recorded by a CC-based platform called C.C.Wallet to better stimate the degree of satisfaction of the members of the community to be used thereafter as a bridge to build “customized community”. Considering this, the backbone of the proposed framework is estimating the degree of satisfaction of the members of the community by utilizing a Neural Network (NN) and this degree of satisfaction was used as an index to determine the members who would be given thereafter a “preference” in terms of bonus premium points to be added to their initial purchase of the CC with legal tender. The proposed index was created based on the number of purchases of the same products and services as well as by analysing C.C.Wallet users' messages (textbased comments and impressions) regarding the offered products and services after completing the transactions in the Japanese language. Thus, to analyse the comment text recorded in C.C.Wallet, it was necessary to use the technology of Natural Language Processing (NLP) where those comments were tokenized into tokens by using a python language-based module. In the current study, the engagement of the members with the provided market was monitored by computing a visual map of Shannon Entropy (SE). Our main findings suggest that the proposed framework should be considered as a tool to construct the concept of a “customized community” where the circulation of CCs is accelerated with the result of further boosting the local economy.