Multi-Karma Economies

Abstract

Limited public resources include fast lanes on highways, parking spots at high-interest locations near a city center, and access to EV charging stations during peak hours. Elokda et al. proposed karma economies as a non-monetary approach to an effective allocation of such resources and demonstrated an improvement of discomfort cost for all participants with respect to classic solutions. However, so far only single-resource economies have been investigated. This thesis extends the model by allowing agents to use their karma points for other resources than they were obtained from. For this new system, two design instruments are considered, namely non-unit exchange rates between different resources, and karma redistribution schemes. In a numerical analysis, we show that an improvement is achieved by coupling economies. We go on to show that the improvement is largely robust to the specifics of the design. In particular, non-unit exchange rates have negligible impact, whereas the redistribution scheme has shown to be more suitable to affect agents’ policies and to implement a policy maker’s notion of fairness.