Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2008

State of the art of the management of debts inside a social group

Inside a social group (friends, roommates, colleagues, ...), people may have debts between each other : by borrowing/lending money or sharing expenses. Debts induced by shared expenses may happen in different situations, like living with roommates or spending holidays with friends. Some situations may be much more complex than others: settling accounts with your 6 roommates after 5 months of shared expenses is not as simple as splitting the bill at the restaurant. That's why each situation may have its best solution. The problem called "managing debts inside a social group" consists into two sub-problems: effectively managing debts between you and the people around you: tracking those debts and possibly simplify them (e.g if A owes B who owes C, maybe it's simpler if A pays C directly), calculate debts induced by shared expenses: tracking those shared expenses and calculate the minimum set of debts. Multiple solutions Currently, the options for managing de