Leader-Selection Mechanisms and Matching Protocols in Public Goods Games
Description
This dataset and the accompanying analysis code support the study “Leader-Selection Mechanisms and Matching Protocols in Public Goods Games: Evidence from the Laboratory.” The data were collected in a controlled online laboratory experiment conducted with 256 college students from Tsinghua University between April and July 2020. Participants were assigned to groups of four and made contribution decisions in a repeated voluntary contribution mechanism over 10 periods. The experiment used a 2 × 4 between-subjects design combining two matching protocols—fixed matching and random rematching—with four leader-selection mechanisms: a leaderless control, random leadership (RL), voluntary leadership by a randomly selected candidate (VL-RC), and delegated leadership by a randomly selected candidate (DL-RC). The de-identified participant-period data include treatment assignment, matching protocol, period, group and role information, leadership acceptance decisions, individual contributions, group contributions, and experimental payoffs. The accompanying code reproduces the statistical analyses reported in the article. All participant identifiers have been removed. The files are intended to support verification and replication of the analyses reported in the associated article.