Title: Leading by example in public goods games with benefit heterogeneity

Speaker: Yu Jing

Abstract: Does leadership promote the provision to public goods when agents have heterogeneous benefits from the pubic goods? This paper examines the effect of leading-by-example in this scenario using a public goods experiment in which half group members have higher marginal per capita return than others. We implement two leadership treatments by exogenously imposing the role of leader to high/low-benefit members separately, and one endogenous leadership treatment in which members can volunteer to be the leader. Experimental results indicate that with randomly imposed leaders, leading-by-example could only marginally promote provisions in later periods. The leader’s contributions mainly influence his follower of the same type. However, the limited effect could be improved by setting a positive role model for the leader, especially a high-benefit leader, in the initial period. When people could decide whether they want to be the leader or not, high-benefit members prefer to be the leader more often, although low-benefit members volunteering to be the leader yields significantly more contributions. Moreover, no volunteer leader seems to be a signal for nobody cooperating, which suggests that when applying voluntary leadership, it is important to consider potential mechanisms when there is no volunteer.

Yu Jing：Yu Jing，Ph.D., Economics, University of Munich, 2016, was a data scientist at Didi Chuxing. Her research interests are behavioral and experimental economics, and public economics. Published a paper in Economic Inquiry.

Date: November 22, Thursday, 2018

Time: 13:30-14:45 PM

Location: Room 608, Academic Hall, CUFE