Promoting Cooperation by Leading:Leader-Selection Mechanisms in Public Goods Games

We conducted an experimental comparison of four leader-selection mechanisms in a public goods game. The results show that purely voluntary leadership yields the weakest overall performance, primarily attributed to the lack of cooperation in leaderless groups and the subpar leadership exhibited by multiple leaders. A new insight from our study is that voluntary leadership by randomly-selected candidates outperforms both exogenously appointed and self-appointed leadership. This superiority likely stems from the mechanism's capability to balance between leaders setting a sufficiently positive example and followers responding reciprocally.