期刊名称：Discussion Papers / Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
印刷版ISSN：0804-6824
出版年度：2014
卷号：2014
出版社：Bergen
摘要：We study how leader compensation affects public goods provision. We reportfrom a lab experiment with four treatments, where the base treatment was a standardpublic goods game with simultaneous contribution decisions, while the threeother treatments allowed participants to volunteer to be the leader in their groupand make their contribution before the others. In the three leader treatments, wemanipulate the level of compensation given to the leader. Our main finding isthat a moderate compensation to the leader is highly beneficial, it increases theaverage contribution by 63% relative to a situation where the leader is not compensatedand by more than 90% relative to a situation without a leader. A furtherincrease in the leader compensation, however, is detrimental to public goods provision;it attracts less morally motivated leaders and creates a social crowding-outeffect that makes it harder to lead by example. Finally, we report from a surveyshowing that the social crowding-out effect is also present in the population atlarge. We argue that the main findings of the paper are important in many reallife settings where we would like to use economic incentives to encourage peopleto lead by example
