Patent ID: 8521611

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of trading articles among a plurality of members who are registered in a common community, the method comprising: (a) providing a user interface that allows a member to: (i) enter articles that the member owns and is willing to trade, and (ii) enter articles that the member wants to own, (b) communicating items (i) and (ii) to and from an administration computer associated with the common community via an electronic network; and (c) the administration computer hosting the plurality of members and facilitating article trades among the members via the administration computer and the electronic network, the administration computer: (i) identifying matches between owned and wanted articles, (ii) associating each member of the plurality of members with a risk assessment score that is a function of a number of trades executed by the respective member and a ratio of good trades to total trades, (iii) associating each member of the plurality of members with a trading credit balance that reflects a difference between a number of articles that the member previously owned and traded to other members and a number of articles that were sent to the member by other members, the trading credit balance being used to generate a trading credit balance number for the member by weighting the trading credit balance based on the risk assessment score associated with the member, and (iv) using a priority algorithm to select one of at least two of the plurality of members who each entered the same article that they want to own to yield a receiving member who will receive the article, the priority algorithm configured for computing priority scores for each of the at least two members based on a plurality of factors, the plurality of factors comprising at least the total number of articles that the member has traded and the trading credit balance number, and selecting the receiving member based on a highest of the priority scores.