Interesting idea. Instead of thinking of computing as an authoritarian schema, it could be a community schema, using a kanban or currency system to communicate resource needs between units.

It's also similar to negotiating memory over commitment in virtualization. VMWare's driver on the VM "inflates a memory bubble" to communicate host memory constraints to all client VMs. This is often done when VMs have allocated 125%-300% of the host's physical RAM, and forces clients to swap more.