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...

This paper examines politics and marriage, with particular attention directed toward gender effects on the political communication that occurs between husbands and wives. Three different models of political interdependence within marriages are considered - social cohesion, self-selection, and...

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...

In a laboratory experiment we compare voluntary cooperation in Iceland and the US (N=156 in a convenience sample of university students). We furthermore compare the associated thought processes across cultures. The two countries have similar economic performance, but survey measures show that...

Scale characteristics are key properties of production functions that determine optimal firm sizes, and have considerable policy implications for sectors undergoing restructuring. However, estimates of scale characteristics typically vary with the assumptions of the underlying empirical model....