Dynamic Resource Allocation with Karma: An Experimental Study

We perform a behavioral experiment of karma, a class of mechanisms for repeated resource allocation with attractive fairness and efficiency properties, in theory. Individuals in these mechanisms bid non-tradable credits that flow from resource consumers to yielders, like karma. Human subjects recruited on Amazon MTurk are repeatedly and randomly paired to bid karma according to time-varying and stochastic individual preferences or urgency to acquire resources. Treatments varied in the dynamic urgency process (frequent moderate urgency versus sporadic high urgency) and the richness of the bidding scheme (binary versus full range). Results are benchmarked against random allocation, and karma achieves a (almost) Pareto improvement over random, despite the MTurk subjects deviating significantly from the theoretically optimal Nash bidding policy. Maximum improvement is attained by subjects that deviate from Nash by up to one karma bid unit on average, and positive improvement is attained with average deviations of up to 3-4 bid units. These findings hold across all treatments, among which no significant differences are found, with the exception of the sporadic high urgency process with binary bidding treatment being (weakly) favorable over others. These results offer behaviorally robust lower bounds for the expected performance of karma in human populations. They also provide guidance for future testing and implementation of karma mechanisms in the real world.