CIVIC-PG Track B: Economic Resiliency through Mechanism Design and Secure Computing: MainStreetPulse: An Early Warning Platform for Monitoring and Supporting Main Street Businesses

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

The project seeks to better understand the health of individual small businesses and Main Street business districts in Boston using cryptography, incentives, and publicly available data. Using these techniques, the city can improve planning recommendations for Main Street Districts and proactively identify distressed businesses for targeted interventions and support. The project ultimately aims to create replicable tools that can be used by all cities to protect and grow the small business sector which serves as the backbone of the American economy, accounting for 44% of all economic activity and 47% of all U.S. employees, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It will also provide tools to prevent and mitigate the impact of business closures on Main Street districts. This challenge became even more acute during the first months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic when an estimated 100,000 businesses were forced to close, a volume much higher than the approximately 600,000 business that exit each year. To achieve this, the research team will develop a predictive model and a user-friendly application using mechanism design and secure computation. The envisioned cloud-native tool can be used by city planners and by individual businesses to make critical decisions such as location citing, rent and payroll budgets, and sales forecasts that leverage projected population shifts. The research questions for Stage 1 are primarily centered around the feasibility of designing a mechanism to predict the distress or closure of small businesses, based on the application of existing data sources along with sensitive data contributed by business owners as a result of the application of mechanism design and secure computation techniques. This model will be tested at the neighborhood scale in the Stage 2 pilot. Participants will be incentivized to contribute business data, because secure multi-party computation will allow the team to develop the model without ever having access to the original data. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.