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...