{"title":"The Limits of Meritocracy","authors":"J. Morgan, Justin Tumlinson, Felix Várdy","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3216950","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"We show that too much meritocracy, modeled as accuracy of performance ranking in contests, can be a bad thing: in contests with homogeneous agents, it reduces output and is Pareto inefficient. In contests with sufficiently heterogeneous agents, discouragement and complacency effects further reduce the benefits of meritocracy. Perfect meritocracy may be optimal only for intermediate levels of heterogeneity.","PeriodicalId":232169,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Other Microeconomics: Asymmetric & Private Information (Topic)","volume":"2 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ERN: Other Microeconomics: Asymmetric & Private Information (Topic)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3216950","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
We show that too much meritocracy, modeled as accuracy of performance ranking in contests, can be a bad thing: in contests with homogeneous agents, it reduces output and is Pareto inefficient. In contests with sufficiently heterogeneous agents, discouragement and complacency effects further reduce the benefits of meritocracy. Perfect meritocracy may be optimal only for intermediate levels of heterogeneity.