Leadership and information in a single‐shot collective action game: An experimental study

We consider a leader–follower mechanism in a collective action game, which exhibits both free riding and coordination problems. Leaders can persuade group cooperation by making a costly commitment to a project. Followers can choose to follow their leaders. The project's return can be transparent to all or only to the leaders. We show experimentally that when free riding is the dominant strategy of an informed subject, concentrating information in the hands of the leaders improves cooperation more effectively than a regime of information dispersal. The coordination problem, however, may be reduced more effectively in a regime of information dispersal. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.