The Limits of Meritocracy
A sandwich lunch will be provided from 12:00
Abstract

We show that too much meritocracy, modeled as accuracy of relative performance evaluation, 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.
Date: 23 April 2018, 12:15 (Monday, 1st week, Trinity 2018)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Seminar Room B
Speaker: Felix Vardy (International Monetary Fund)
Organising department: Department of Economics
Organiser contact email address: facultyadmin@economics.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Postdoc & DPhil Workshop
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Anne Pouliquen, Melis Clark