| Popis: |
"Karma" is designed with the goal (i) to overcome social dilemma, (ii) to enable efficient coordination, and (iii) to facilitate fair public goods allocation. Karma, neither money nor an alternative currency, is a public counter associated with individuals that tracks individuals’ resource consumption: it can only be exchanged according to certain rules preserving fairness. The goal of this project is to study such “karma economies” in a controlled experiment to identify their overall welfare properties and validate Nash predictions. The experiments derive from our papers (Elokda et al., 2021, 2022, 2023) that propose the non-tradable karma approach in the mobility domain. We perform a standard economic experiment conducted online. Recruitment will be done through a pre-registered participant pool from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, as used by the Decision Science Laboratory of ETH Zurich. We endow participants with an equal initial amount of karma tokens, and over multiple rounds we associate to them different levels of urgency randomly drawn from a common distribution. They decide how much karma to use in a sealed bidding procedure, which gives them priority if they bid higher than a randomly matched opponent translating to an urgency-weighed increase in score and bonus fee. In multiple treatments we test different parameters and variants of the karma protocol. Earnings will include a fixed show-up fee, and a variable bonus that depends on decisions of the participants in line with online experiments standards. There is minimal risk for the participants. |
