How to Select the Leader in a One-Shot Public Goods Game: Evidence from the Laboratory

Description

We experimentally study how leadership selection mechanisms influence public goods provision in a random-pairing repeated one-shot public goods game. The central hypothesis is that the way leaders are chosen—whether through random selection or through voluntary self-selection—affects group cooperation through signaling and reciprocity. In particular, we predicted that Voluntary leadership from a randomly selected candidate (VL-RC) is a promising endogenous leadership selection mechanism, primarily because assuming leadership by revealed preference signals cooperative play, the absence of leadership leaves the possibility of unlucky cooperative candidates, and sole leadership removes the leader’s free-riding incentives. One hundred and sixty college students from Tsinghua University participated in the public goods game. In each period, we randomly assigned subjects into groups of four, and subjects were endowed with a fixed number of tokens, which they could either keep privately or contribute to a public account. We used a random pairing design, ensuring each interaction was a fresh, one-shot decision. We tested five treatments: a baseline control with simultaneous contributions and four leadership treatments—Random Leadership (RL), Voluntary Leadership (VL), Random Leadership from Voluntary Candidates (RL-VC), and Voluntary Leadership from a Random Candidate (VL-RC). The data revealed several notable findings. First, introducing a leadership role did not consistently boost overall contributions compared with the control, and the pure voluntary mechanism (VL) performed the worst. Groups without any leader contributed significantly less than those with a leader. VL-RC was the most effective endogenous mechanism: Imposing a higher barrier to leadership, it reduced the diffusion of responsibility and free-riding among potential leaders. In contrast, mechanisms allowing multiple leaders (VL and RL-VC) tended to induce more selfish behavior, as evidenced by lower average contributions from leaders in these settings. Additionally, leaders generally contributed more than followers. However, the strength of the leader-follower influence varied across treatments. There was a significant positive correlation between leader and follower contributions in VL but not in other treatments. The findings suggest that the informativeness of signaling and reciprocity of leadership selection mechanisms is crucial for public goods provision. Policymakers and organizational leaders shall create barriers in selecting candidates and privately encourage the candidate who values the common good the most to lead by example voluntarily.

Steps to reproduce

Unzip "Data.zip". Refer to the "Read Me.docx" document for general guidelines. Refer to the "Do File" document for codes that reproduce all results in the paper.

Institutions

• Beijing Foreign Studies University
• Shandong University

Categories

Funders

• Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation

  Grant ID: ZR2024MG004
• The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

  Grant ID: 2021QD032
• National Natural Science Foundation of China

  China

  Grant ID: 72073080
• Research Achievements of "Double First-class" Major Project of Beijing Foreign Studies University

  Grant ID: 2022SYLZD001

Licence