Social stratification, segregation and inequity invite concerns about fairness and social harmony. Our game-theoretic and experimental results indicate that they can also be detrimental to productivity, efficiency, and welfare. Class is defined by players’ resources, incentives to make a...

A new mechanism that substantially mitigates social dilemmas is examined theoretically and experimentally. It resembles the voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) except that in each decision round subjects are ranked and then grouped according to their public contribution. The game has multiple...

A new mechanism that substantially mitigates social dilemmas is examined theoretically and experimentally. It resembles the voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) except that in each decision round subjects are ranked and then grouped according to their public contribution. The game has multiple...

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...

A new mechanism that substantially mitigates social dilemmas is examined theoretically and experimentally. It resembles the voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) except that in each decision round subjects are ranked and then grouped according to their public contribution. The game has multiple...

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...

We examine theoretically and experimentally how a society's grouping and stratification rules affect incentives and efficiency, and compare meritocratic and ascriptive grouping. We present a multi-level model of social production, and extend the usual single-group-level analysis of cooperation...

We test, via cross-cultural comparison, the robustness of complex tacit coordination in an endogenous-grouping mechanism originally introduced and experimentally tested by Gunnthorsdottir, Vragov, Seifert and McCabe, 2010. The authors call their mechanism "Group-based Meritocracy...

We test, via cross-cultural comparison, the robustness of complex tacit coordination in an endogenous-grouping mechanism originally introduced and experimentally tested by Gunnthorsdottir, Vragov, Seifert and McCabe, 2010. The authors call their mechanism "Group-based Meritocracy...