Leading-by-example and signaling in voluntary contribution games: an experimental study

By J. Potters, Martin Sefton, Lise Vesterlund. 2007

341 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report experimental results on the effect of leadership in a voluntary contribution game. Consistent with recent theories we find that leading-by-example increases contributions and earnings in an environment where a leader has private information about the returns from contributing (Hermalin in Am Econ Rev 88:1188–1206, 1998; Vesterlund in J Public Econ 87:627–657, 2003). In contrast the ability to lead-by-example has no effect on total contributions and earnings when such returns are commonly known. In our environment the success of leadership therefore appears to be driven by signaling rather than by nonpecuniary factors such as reciprocity.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bc66087729aaf763bbec95134766ef77984311df

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In Management Science and Operations Research

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Simultaneous and Sequential Contributions to Step-level Public Goods (2015, neutral): “Potters, Sefton, and Vesterlund (2007) report that the leading-by-example approach depends on whether there is incomplete information in the experiment.”
Matched Fundraising: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment (2010, background): “3 or challenge gift, can influence charitable giving [List and Lucking-Reiley 2002, Rondeau and List 2003, Landry et al 2006, Potters et al 2007].”
Fundraising through online social networks: A field experiment on peer-to-peer solicitation (2014, neutral): “Also, information on the giving decisions of others may be in ﬂ uential to the decision to donate (for some examples, see Frey and Meier, 2004; Shang and Croson, 2009; Andreoni and Petrie, 2004; Soetevent, 2005; Potters et al., 2007).”
The Effect of Status on Charitable Giving (2010, methodology): “16The voluntary contribution game mirrors that of Potters, Sefton, and Vesterlund (2005, 2007) when m = 0.75.”
Leading by example with and without exclusion power in voluntary contribution experiments (2007, background): “Yet, as far as their full information treatments are concerned, both Potters et al. (2006) and Meidinger and Villeval (2002) report that followers condition their contribution on the contribution of their leaders, meaning that even in the absence of private information leadership can change…”
Making or breaking climate targets: : The AMPERE study on staged accession scenarios for climate policy (2015, neutral): “Such unilateral climate action might both reduce uncertainty about the mitigation costs and, at the same time, build credibility, which is an important element in international coordination problems [8 – 10].”
Leadership and the voluntary provision of public goods: Field evidence from Bolivia (2015, background): “Potters et al. (2005, 2007) provide laboratory evidence supporting these results.”