Game on! Seminars

Game theory. Control. Intelligent systems.

Participation is open to everyone with no registration required.
The talks are typically held on Tuesdays at 16:00 CET.

Upcoming seminars

23-June-2026, 15:00 CET

Dr. Ezzat Elokda
KTH Stockholm

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

Cyber-Physical-Human-Systems (CPHS) play a pivotal role in addressing ongoing societal challenges such as the pressing clean energy transition. These systems are tasked with real-time allocation of essential public resources to human users, 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 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.” A comprehensive theory of karma is presented, spanning game-theoretic modelling as Dynamic Population Games (DPGs) in which Stationary Nash Equilibria (SNE) are guaranteed to exist; an analysis of fairness and efficiency properties rooted in social choice theory showing that karma maximizes Long-run Nash Welfare (LNW); and implications of these results in transportation and energy applications. The talk also outlines ongoing efforts to “close the loop” between theory and practice with human experiments of a karma-based residential heating energy allocation system aimed at promoting sustainable living practices, to be conducted in the KTH Live-In Lab.

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