Not Just Like Starting Over: Leadership and Revivification of Cooperation in Groups

Jordi Brandts, Christina Rott and Carles Solà

No 775, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how, after a history of decay, cooperation in a repeated voluntary contribution game can be revived in an enduring way. Simply starting the repeated game over - a simple fresh start - leads to an initial increase of cooperation, but to a subsequent new decay. Motivated by cooperation decay in organizations we study the potential of three interventions of triggering higher and sustained cooperation, which take place at the same time as a restart. Surprisingly, we find that the detailed explanation of the causes of the decay in cooperation of Fischbacher and Gaechter (2010) combined with an advice on how to prevent decay do not have an effect beyond that of just starting over. In contrast, a one-way free form communication message sent by the leader to the followers strongly revives cooperation. We find evidence that repeated free form communication by the leader further strengthens the reviving effect on cooperation. Combining the two previous interventions does not outperform the pure effect of communication. Our content analysis reveals that leader communication is more people oriented than the expert advice.

Keywords: Leadership; cooperation; communication; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C73 C92 D83 J63 L20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
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Journal Article: Not just like starting over - Leadership and revivification of cooperation in groups (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:775

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