on the efficiency of team-based meritocracies

Anna Gunnthorsdottir, Roumen Vragov, Stefan seifert and Kevin McCabe ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: According to theory a pure meritocracy is efficient because individual members are competitively rewarded according to their individual contributions to society. However, purely individually based meritocracies seldom occur. We introduce a new model of social production called “team-based meritocracy” (TBM) in which individual members are rewarded based on their team membership. We demonstrate that as long as such team membership is both mobile and competitively based on contributions, individuals are able to tacitly coordinate a complex and counterintuitive asymmetric equilibrium that is close to Pareto-optimal, possibly indicating that such a group-based meritocracy could be a social structure to which humans respond with particular ease. Our findings are relevant to many contemporary societies in which rewards are at least in part determined via membership in organizations such as for example firms, and organizational membership is increasingly determined by contribution rather than privilege.

Keywords: social stratification; meritocracies; mechanism design; non-cooperative games; experiment; team production. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D20 C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
Date: 2008-01-07
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