Fiscal federalism is often hailed as an innovation procedure: successful policy experiments in one jurisdiction will, via imitation, spread through the entire system, leading to overall better policy performance. We show that such hopes set in laboratory federalism may be ill-founded. For a...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other ¯elds, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...