Who Disciplines the Leader? Leadership as Exposure

Keisuke Hattori

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Leadership is usually understood as a means of influencing followers. Can it also discipline the leader herself? In an infinitely repeated team-production game where the leader moves first, sequential timing creates an enforcement asymmetry: a shirking leader is punished within the same period, whereas a follower can free ride on the leader's sunk effort and is punished only later. Full exposure removes the leader's dynamic incentive constraint and turns role assignment into a choice of whom to discipline. Holding the other dimension fixed, the less patient member should lead, whereas the more able member should follow, because ability relaxes the only remaining constraint. When high ability and low patience coincide in one person, task complementarity favors keeping that person as a productive follower, while substitutability favors assigning her to lead. This pure-exposure benchmark is sharply overturned once a leader's traits spill over to followers: above a single assimilation threshold, the conventional assignment of the high-ability, patient leader becomes superior on both output and enforcement grounds. Greater transparency of the leader's effort strengthens this disciplinary mechanism, and costly supervision can substitute for that discipline. The model implies that promoting the best worker can undermine team cooperation even when that worker would make a competent leader.

Keywords: leadership; repeated games; team production; cooperation; promotion; supervision (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 D23 J24 M51 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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