Maneki Neko is a short story about an AI that manages a kind of gift economy. It's an enjoyable read.

I've been curious about this 'class' of systems for a while now, but I don't think I know enough about economics to ask the questions well. For example- the story supplies a superintelligence to function as a competent central manager, but could such a gift network theoretically exist without being centrally managed (and without trivially reducing to modern forms of currency exchange)? Could a variant of Watson be used to automate the distribution of capital in the same way that it makes a medical dignosis? And so on.

In particular, I'm looking for the intellectual tools that would be used to ask these questions in a more rigorous way; it would be great if I had better ways of figuring out which of these questions are obviously stupid and which are not. Specific disciplines in economics or game theory, perhaps. Things along the lines of LW's Mechanism Design sequence would be fantastic. Can anyone give me a few pointers?