A Vision for Trustworthy, Fair, and Efficient Socio-Technical Control using Karma Economies

TL;DR

This paper proposes karma economies as a non-monetary, dynamic control mechanism for fair and efficient resource allocation in smart cities, emphasizing long-term welfare and trustworthiness.

Contribution

It introduces karma economies as a novel non-monetary approach for socio-technical control, emphasizing dynamic, long-term resource management and welfare maximization.

Findings

Karma Nash equilibria maximize long-run Nash welfare.

Karma economies offer flexible design for resource fairness and efficiency.

The approach shifts resource allocation from static to dynamic, repeated games.

Abstract

Control systems will play a pivotal role in addressing societal-scale challenges as they drive the development of sustainable future smart cities. At the heart of these challenges is the trustworthy, fair, and efficient allocation of scarce public resources, including renewable energy, transportation, data, computation, etc.. Historical evidence suggests that monetary control -- the prototypical mechanism for managing resource scarcity -- is not always well-accepted in socio-technical resource contexts. In this vision article, we advocate for karma economies as an emerging non-monetary mechanism for socio-technical control. Karma leverages the repetitive nature of many socio-technical resources to jointly attain trustworthy, fair, and efficient allocations; by budgeting resource consumption over time and letting resource users ``play against their future selves.'' To motivate karma, we review related concepts in economics through a control systems lens, and make a case for a) shifting the viewpoint of resource allocations from single-shot and static to repeated and dynamic games; and b) adopting long-run Nash welfare as the formalization of ``fairness and efficiency'' in socio-technical contexts. We show that in many dynamic resource settings, karma Nash equilibria maximize long-run Nash welfare. Moreover, we discuss implications for a future smart city built on multi-karma economies: by choosing whether to combine different socio-technical resources, e.g., electricity and transportation, in a single karma economy, or separate into resource-specific economies, karma provides new flexibility to design the scope of fairness and efficiency.