When do token systems stabilize? Compatibility constraints and community structure

Source abstract

Token systems support repeated service exchange without monetary transfers, but their viability depends on the stability of token balances. We study token systems with compatibility constraints among agents. A requester is randomly sampled in each period, and only a few randomly sampled agents are available to provide service. We establish a necessary and sufficient condition for stability and show that the minimum-token rule, which selects the available provider with the lowest token balance, achieves the optimal stability region. We then apply this stability criterion to a random token system generated from stochastic block models with uniformly sampled requesters. We tightly characterize the stability regime by identifying two obstructions to stability: insufficient service opportunities for a group of communities or for an individual agent.