Aligning the “Socio” in Socio-Technical Control: Trustworthy, Fair, and Efficient Resource Allocation with Karma Economies

Overview

Control systems will play a pivotal role in addressing future societal challenges, including the pressing clean energy transition. At the heart of these challenges is the trustworthy, fair, and efficient allocation of scarce public resources, e.g., renewable energy, transportation, data, and computation, etc., for which status-quo monetary mechanisms have faced controversy and public dismay. This talk introduces karma economies, a novel class of non-monetary mechanisms that leverage the repeated and dynamic nature of many socio-technical resources to allocate them in a trustworthy, fair, and efficient manner. Karma is a non-tradable token used to bid for resources repeatedly, flowing from resource gainers to yielders in a closed and indefinitely sustainable cycle. This design encourages truthful bidding according to private needs, as participants effectively “play against their future selves.” We present a comprehensive theory of karma economies spanning game-theoretic modelling; fairness and efficiency guarantees rooted in social choice theory; applications in transportation; and behavioral experimental validation. We also outline a vision for a sustainable smart grid powered by karma.