Meritocracy dissolves the efficiency-equality tradeoff in public-goods games
نویسندگان
چکیده
One of the fundamental tradeoffs underlying society is that between efficiency and equality. The challenge for institutional design is to strike the right balance between these two goals. Game-theoretic models of public-goods provision under ‘meritocratic’ matching succinctly capture this tradeoff: under zero meritocracy (society is randomly formed), theory predicts maximal inefficiency but perfect equality; higher levels of meritocracy (society matches contributors with contributors) are predicted to improve efficiency but come at the cost of growing inequality. We conduct an experiment to test this tradeoff behaviorally and make the astonishing finding that, notwithstanding theoretical predictions, higher levels of meritocracy increase both efficiency and equality. Fairness considerations explain the departures from theoretical predictions including the dissolution of the efficiency-equality tradeoff.
منابع مشابه
Affirmative Action, Meritocracy, and Efficiency on Behalf Of: Affirmative Action, Meritocracy, and Efficiency
This article provides a framework for comparing meritocratic and affirmative action admissions policies. The context of the analysis is admissions to public universities; admission rules are evaluated as part of the public investment problem faced by a state government. Meritocratic and affirmative admissions policies are compared in terms of their effects on the level and distribution of human...
متن کاملOption Fund Market Dynamics for Threshold Public Goods
Economic agents have the possibility to fund the protection of environmental public goods, such as natural ecosystems and biodiversity, facing unknown risks of collapse, which could help to back them up. On the base of the prediction markets, which meet with a degree of success since their introduction, we propose an evolutionary model of an option fund market for the threshold environmental pu...
متن کاملPublic-Goods Games with Endogenous Institution-Formation: Experimental Evidence on the Effect of the Voting Rule
We report experimental results on voluntary contributions to public-goods provision from situations in which parties can create institutions to impose a certain contribution level on its members. We focus on a public-goods game where the joint decisions inside the institution are made based on the plurality voting rule. We show that, comparing to the unanimity voting rule, the plurality rule re...
متن کاملHow cheap talk enhances efficiency in threshold public goods games
This paper uses a Bayesian mechanism design approach to investigate the effects of communication in a threshold public goods game. Individuals have private information about contribution costs. Individuals can each make a discrete contribution. If the number of contributors is at least equal to the threshold, a public benefit accrues to all members of the group. We experimentally implement thre...
متن کاملComparing the effect of religiosity on public goods production and natural resource conservation: a experimental study
In this research, the effect of religiosity on participation in the production of public goods and preservation of natural resources has been investigated. Extraction of participation data and conservation of natural resource has been done through the implementation of online laboratory of public goods and natural resource games. To extract the three dimensions of religiosity (belief, rituals a...
متن کامل