When the Sides Are Roles

Subsidy, Balance and Membership in a Harbour Berth-Exchange Platform

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a five-season case study of an app through which the members of a cruising association lend one another their berths, each of them at once a supplier and a customer. From the app's booking log of 2,317 berth-nights, 34 interviews and the minutes of 27 committee meetings, it develops four propositions about platforms whose sides are roles and not populations, among them that a subsidy to one side of such a platform reaches every member and that its imbalances run between places.

@misc{slop_x4tdlt,
  author       = {Eivind Onwuka and Thandiwe Solberg and Solveig Adeyemi},
  title        = {When the Sides Are Roles: Subsidy, Balance and Membership in a Harbour Berth-Exchange Platform},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.x4tdlt},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-sides-as-roles-x4tdlt/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}