Leadership and overcoming coordination failure with asymmetric costs
通过弱链博弈实验，研究了成本不对称如何影响财务激励帮助群体摆脱协调失败，发现早期领导力来自最常见的成本类型而非低成本者，存在从众效应。
Abstract We study how the heterogeneity of agents affects the extent to which changes in financial incentives can pull a group out of a situation of coordination failure. We focus on the connections between cost asymmetries and leadership. Experimental subjects interact in groups of four in a series of weak-link games. The treatment variable is the distribution of high and low effort cost across subjects. We present data for one, two and three low-cost subjects as well as control sessions with symmetric costs. The overall pattern of coordination improvement is common across treatments. Early coordination improvements depend on the distribution of high and low effort costs across subjects, but these differences disappear with time. We find that initial leadership in overcoming coordination failure is not driven by low-cost subjects but by subjects with the most common cost type. This conformity effect may be due to a kind of group identity or to the cognitive simplicity of acting with identical others.