Meritocracy, egalitarianism and the stability of majoritarian organizations
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Date
05/2015Keywords
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Abstract
Egalitarianism and meritocracy are competing principles to distribute the joint benefits of cooperation. We examine the consequences of letting members of society vote between those two principles, in a context where individuals must join with others into coalitions of a certain size to become productive. Our setup induces a hedonic game of coalition formation. We study the existence of core stable partitions (organizational structures) of this game. We show that the inability of voters to commit to one distributional rule or another is a potential source of instability. But we also prove that, when stable organizational structures exist, they may be rich in form, and different than those predicted by alternative models of coalition formation. Non-segregated coalitions may arise within core stable structures. Stability is also compatible with the coexistence of meritocratic and egalitarian coalitions. These phenomena are robust, and persist under alternative variants of our initial model.
Citation
Barberà , S , Beviá , C & Ponsatí , C 2015 , ' Meritocracy, egalitarianism and the stability of majoritarian organizations ' , Games and Economic Behavior , vol. 91 , pp. 237–257 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2015.03.004
Publication
Games and Economic Behavior
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0899-8256Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. This is the author's version of this work. The published version is available at www.sciencedirect.com
Description
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2011-0075). Barberà and Beviá acknowledge support from grants “Consolidated Group-C” ECO2008-04756 and FEDER, and SGR2014-515. Ponsatí acknowledges support from grants ECO2012-37065, and SGR2009-1142.Collections
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