Who Makes a Good Leader? Social Preferences and Leading-by-Example

Simon Gächter, Daniele Nosenzo, Elke Renner and Martin Sefton

No 3914, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: We examine the effects of social preferences and beliefs about the social preferences of others in a simple leader-follower voluntary contributions game. We find that groups perform best when led by those who are reciprocally oriented. Part of the effect can be explained by a false consensus effect: selfish players tend to think it more likely that they are matched with another selfish player and reciprocators tend to think it more likely that they are matched with another reciprocator. Thus, reciprocators contribute more as leaders partly because they are more optimistic than selfish players about the reciprocal responses of followers. However, even after controlling for beliefs we find that reciprocally-oriented leaders contribute more than selfish leaders. Thus, we conclude that differing leader contributions by differing types of leader must in large part reflect social motivations.

Keywords: contribution preferences; leading-by-example; false consensus effect; reciprocity; leadership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C92 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in: Economic Inquiry, 2012, 50 (4), 867–879; 10.1111/j.1465-7295.2010.00295.x

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3914.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Who Makes a Good Leader? Social Preferences and Leading-by-Example (2009)
Working Paper: Who Makes a Good Leader? Social Preferences and Leading-by-Example (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3914

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().