This article provides a framework for comparing meritocratic and affirmative action admissions policies. The context of the analysis is admissions to public universities; admission rules are evaluated as part of the public investment problem faced by a state government. Meritocratic and affirmative admissions policies are compared in terms of their effects on the level and distribution of human...

Meritocracy is a rationality that has significantly shaped the lives of people in modern societies, and today we all more or less believe those who are smart, capable hardworking will succeed life. This seems to be rule applies areas public In Western world, evaluating judging ourselves others based on meritocracy become an imperative rarely question despite problems associated with meritocracy...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the recruitment of elites in the Western world leads to social cohesion, or to the opposite -social stratification. We show that the main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their recruitment. Although meritocratic selection should result in the best being chosen, we show that m...

Uncompetitive contests for grades, promotions, retention, and job assignments, which feature lax standards limited candidate pools, are often criticized being unmeritocratic. We show that, when contestants strategic, exclusivity can make selection more meritocratic. When many compete a few strategic adopt high-risk strategies. Risk-taking reduces the correlation between performance ability. Thr...