IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jnlrbe/105.00000117.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Effect of Leadership on Free-Riding: Results from a Public-Good Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Parsons, Daniel M.
  • Feltovich, Nick
  • Grossman, Philip J.

Abstract

We examine the impact of two types of communication: (i) encouragement of honesty and (ii) encouragement of lying that benefits the group. Subjects choose contributions to a public good, with a portion of the contribution framed as determined by a self-reported die roll. While honesty is typically viewed as desirable, in our setting it is more equivocal, since it results in a sub-optimal group payoff. We find that when leaders encourage their followers to lie in a cooperative way, followers increase these “die roll†contributions. There is also a positive spillover into additional discretionary contributions to the public good. By contrast, the way leaders are chosen and their observed contribution history have little effect.

Suggested Citation

  • Parsons, Daniel M. & Feltovich, Nick & Grossman, Philip J., 2020. "The Effect of Leadership on Free-Riding: Results from a Public-Good Experiment," Review of Behavioral Economics, now publishers, vol. 7(1), pages 31-63, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:jnlrbe:105.00000117
    DOI: 10.1561/105.000001117
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/105.000001117
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1561/105.000001117?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mario Daniele Amore & Orsola Garofalo & Alice Guerra, 2023. "How Leaders Influence (un)Ethical Behaviors Within Organizations: A Laboratory Experiment on Reporting Choices," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 183(2), pages 495-510, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Leader; Cheap talk; Lying; Honesty; Group culture;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • M14 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - Corporate Culture; Diversity; Social Responsibility

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:now:jnlrbe:105.00000117. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucy Wiseman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nowpublishers.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.