This paper experimentally investigates how risk attitudes mitigate leadership effectiveness in a collective setting with projects that exhibit both free riding and coordination problems. We take two novel approaches: 1) the introduction of economic game theory to psychological studies of...

Models of social preferences (i.e. inequality aversion), assuming society is defined by a hierarchy based on income or wealth, predict that the poor envy the rich. Reference Group Theory predicts that the poor (rich) envy others from the same social group or class. We report results from a game...

We report results from a multi-period game designed to stimulate anti-social preferences and to measure the cost of to a society with members who act on these preferences. There are a number of important features of our game that, while individually not unique, in total distinguish it from...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with salient incentives, a technique used by economists to study gender differences in leadership. We strip the concept of leadership down to its most basic elements. Questions of style and evaluations of a leader based on style of leadership adopted are made...

The current “buzzword” among leaders is “transparency.” Hardly a day goes by that a group leader (politician, manager, or administrator) doesn’t state that he values transparency and will provide full disclosure of his information and actions. This project tests experimentally whether...

Our experimental results suggest that the effectiveness of leading by example decreases with group size. The discrepancy between the leaders' and followers' incentives increases with group size. Thus, as group size increases, followers more often refuse to follow their leaders.

We present an information based model of leadership in a setting that exhibits the familiar problems of free riding and coordination failure. Leaders have superior information about the value of the project in hand and can send a costly signal to their uninformed followers to persuade them to...

We consider a leader–follower mechanism in a collective action game, which exhibits both free riding and coordination problems. Leaders can persuade group cooperation by making a costly commitment to a project. Followers can choose to follow their leaders. The project's return can be...

An individual should be indifferent between a rebate subsidy of rate sr and a matching subsidy of rate sm = sr /(1 - sr), and the total amount received by the charity should be the same regardless of subsidy type. Recent laboratory and field experiments contradict these straightforward...

Using experimental techniques, we identify parental attitudes toward different-gendered children in rural Bangladesh. We randomly selected households that had at least two school-age children (6–18 years) of different genders. Parents, either jointly or individually, were given endowments to...