Abstract
A peer-to-peer reward ledger is described in which every credit (an incentive reward for a recorded kind act, or a transfer received from another member) is split 50/50 at the moment of credit between a personal account the member keeps and an earmarked, forward-only giving balance whose only outflow is a transfer to another member. That transfer is itself a credit and splits again, so a quantity passed down a chain lands, in aggregate, exactly its own amount in personal accounts and creates nothing. Giver identity is withheld from recipients by default, the ledger is scoped to a family group, and every unspent giving balance returns to zero once a year, assigned to a common fund rather than rolled over. The paper argues that this combination lets members of households with little or no discretionary income take the giver's role in prosocial spending without first holding a surplus: the wellbeing benefit of giving is available without sacrifice to those with surplus and priced in subsistence for those without. Default donor anonymity is argued to remove the size signal that makes a small gift embarrassing and a large one status-bearing. Prior art cited includes classical sources that measure a gift against its giver's means and a patented rebate-allocation system that discloses an earmark earlier. A single pilot family prompted the thesis and is reported as n = 1. Stated limits: pre-committed giving is costless giving, anonymity in a small group is thin, and the registered tests are not yet scorable.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "Giving Is a Gift Too: How a Split Reward Ledger and Anonymity Make Every Family Member a Giver — Splitting Each Credit Between a Kept Account and an Earmarked Give-Only Balance, with Default Donor Anonymity, Family Scope and an Annual Reset", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11958