Pre-election communication in public good games with endogenous leaders

Lisa Bruttel, Gerald Eisenkopf () and Juri Nithammer ()
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Gerald Eisenkopf: University of Vechta
Juri Nithammer: University of Potsdam

No 73, CEPA Discussion Papers from Center for Economic Policy Analysis

Abstract: Leadership plays an important role for the efficient and fair solution of social dilemmas but the effectiveness of a leader can vary substantially. Two main factors of leadership impact are the ability to induce high contributions by all group members and the (expected) fair use of power. Participants in our experiment decide about contributions to a public good. After all contributions are made, the leader can choose how much of the joint earnings to assign to herself; the remainder is distributed equally among the followers. Using machine learning techniques, we study whether the content of initial open statements by the group members predicts their behavior as a leader and whether groups are able to identify such clues and endogenously appoint a “good” leader to solve the dilemma. We find that leaders who promise fairness are more likely to behave fairly, and that followers appoint as leaders those who write more explicitly about fairness and efficiency. However, in their contribution decision, followers focus on the leader’s first-move contribution and place less importance on the content of the leader’s statements.

Keywords: Leadership; Public good; Voting; Promises; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D23 D72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pot:cepadp:73

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