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...

Introduction for Experimental economics and culture / Anna Gunnthorsdottir and Douglas A. Norton -- Why use qualitative methods to study culture in economic life? / Virgil Henry Storr and Arielle John -- A note on qualitative methods in experimental economics / Douglas A. Norton -- Culture as a...

The contributions in this volume discuss new approaches to the measurement of culture and how to conceptualize and define values and beliefs and the groups that share them, and they contribute to the growing body of literature that documents how cultural differences in social and economic behavior.

"Culture has been referred to as a shared frame, the lens through which group members make sense of the world. It has been robustly linked to economic outcomes on the macro level and is also directly linked to decision-making: in recent years, experimental and behavioral economists have found...