The Effect Of Leading By Example And Different Characteristics Of Followers On Cooperation

Purpose: In This study, we add leading-by-example to public goods game to examine the effect of leading by example on public cooperation and the trend of such effect as well. Besides, we are also interested in how people with different characteristics response in public goods game.Method: There are mainly two parts in this research. In part I, we use a sequential voluntary game by the software Z-tree to explore the influence of different levels of leading-by-example on followers’ cooperation with four treatments, including the controls, leader with high cooperation, leader with medium cooperation and leader with low cooperation( or C, HL, ML and LL for short). In part II, questionnaire is used to compare the cooperation of followers with different characteristics, including trust and risk attitudes, and Machiavellian as well.Results:1. For cooperation, the influence of leading-by-example varies as the cooperation level of leaders differs. The more leader contributes, the more the follower response. While, the presence of leader(no matter the cooperation level is high, medium or low) does not promote the followers’ cooperation.2. For the tendency of follower’s cooperation, the followers of HL, ML and C contributes less as the experiment processes. Although the followers’ contribution in LL drops swiftly in round 2, it keeps steady later in the experiment.3. For the income, only when the leader is low-cooperative, leader’s income is significantly higher than the followers. Leaders with high or medium cooperation earn less than followers, but high-cooperative leaders significantly enhance the income of whole group.4. Subjects who believe “Most People Can Be Trusted” contribute less than those who believe “one needs ‘‘to be very careful in dealing with people”. The more risky the subjects are, the more they tend to contribute. Besides, no significant relationship is found between the score of Machiavellian and contribution.5. The OLS models show that, followers in LL contribute 4.15 tokens more than subjects in group C(p<0.01). Consistent with the results of non-parametric test, subjects with high risky attitude contribute more than ones with low risky attitude(p<0.01), and subjects who believe “Most People Can Be Trusted” contributes 1.43 tokens less than those who believe “one needs to be very careful in dealing with people”. While, the score of Machiavellian is found unrelated with cooperation level.Conclusion:1. As compared with the situation of no leader, leading-by-example with high contribution benefits the cooperation and income of whole group by its high cooperation.2. Compared with no leader, the low-cooperative leader harms the cooperation of followers / whole group, but the followers keep a much higher cooperation(than their leader) to prevent the teamwork from breaking down.3. When the leader is high-cooperative or medium-cooperative, the followers’ income is much higher than their leaders’, in other words, the followers are the free-riders. In contrast, when the leader is low-cooperative, the followers’ income is much lower than the leader, in other words, the leaders are free-riders.4. The effect of leading-by-example, which does not show up instantly, is delayed and continuous.5. People with high risk attitude tend to be more operative, while trust attitude and Machiavellian are not good indicators for cooperation level.