Not just like starting over - Leadership and revivification of cooperation in groups

Jordi Brandts; Christina Rott; Carles Solà

doi:10.1007/s10683-015-9468-6

Not just like starting over - Leadership and revivification of cooperation in groups

Jordi Brandts, Christina Rott^*, Carles Solà

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how, after a history of decay, cooperation in a repeated voluntary contribution game can be revived in an enduring way. Simply starting the repeated game over—a simple fresh start—leads to an initial increase of cooperation, but to a subsequent new decay. Motivated by cooperation decay in organizations we study the potential of three interventions of triggering higher and sustained cooperation, which take place at the same time as a restart. Surprisingly, we find that the detailed explanation of the causes of the decay in cooperation of Fischbacher and Gächter (Am Econ Rev 100:541–556, 2010) combined with an advice on how to prevent decay do not have an effect beyond that of just starting over. In contrast, a one-way free form communication message sent by the leader to the followers strongly revives cooperation. We find evidence that repeated free form communication by the leader further strengthens the reviving effect on cooperation. Combining the two previous interventions does not outperform the pure effect of communication. Our content analysis reveals that leader communication is more people oriented than the expert advice.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	792-818
Number of pages	27
Journal	Experimental Economics
Volume	19
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9468-6
Publication status	Published - 1 Dec 2016
Externally published	Yes

Funding

We would like to thank Gary Charness, Orsola Garofalo, Ernesto Reuben, Julian Rode, Arthur Schram, Daniel Schunk and the participants in the discussion lunch at the Business Department at UAB, at the Alhambra workshop 2011, at the IMEBE conference 2013 and at the ABEE conference 2014 as well as several seminar participants and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on how to improve the paper. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Antoni Serra Ramoneda (UAB???Catalunya Caixa) Research Chair, the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness (Grant: ECO2011-29847-C02-01), the Generalitat de Catalunya (Grant: 2009 SGR 820) and the Barcelona GSE.

Keywords

Communication
Cooperation
Experiments
Leadership

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abstract = "We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how, after a history of decay, cooperation in a repeated voluntary contribution game can be revived in an enduring way. Simply starting the repeated game over—a simple fresh start—leads to an initial increase of cooperation, but to a subsequent new decay. Motivated by cooperation decay in organizations we study the potential of three interventions of triggering higher and sustained cooperation, which take place at the same time as a restart. Surprisingly, we find that the detailed explanation of the causes of the decay in cooperation of Fischbacher and G{\"a}chter (Am Econ Rev 100:541–556, 2010) combined with an advice on how to prevent decay do not have an effect beyond that of just starting over. In contrast, a one-way free form communication message sent by the leader to the followers strongly revives cooperation. We find evidence that repeated free form communication by the leader further strengthens the reviving effect on cooperation. Combining the two previous interventions does not outperform the pure effect of communication. Our content analysis reveals that leader communication is more people oriented than the expert advice.",

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N2 - We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how, after a history of decay, cooperation in a repeated voluntary contribution game can be revived in an enduring way. Simply starting the repeated game over—a simple fresh start—leads to an initial increase of cooperation, but to a subsequent new decay. Motivated by cooperation decay in organizations we study the potential of three interventions of triggering higher and sustained cooperation, which take place at the same time as a restart. Surprisingly, we find that the detailed explanation of the causes of the decay in cooperation of Fischbacher and Gächter (Am Econ Rev 100:541–556, 2010) combined with an advice on how to prevent decay do not have an effect beyond that of just starting over. In contrast, a one-way free form communication message sent by the leader to the followers strongly revives cooperation. We find evidence that repeated free form communication by the leader further strengthens the reviving effect on cooperation. Combining the two previous interventions does not outperform the pure effect of communication. Our content analysis reveals that leader communication is more people oriented than the expert advice.

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Not just like starting over - Leadership and revivification of cooperation in groups

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