Direct Election of Group Decision-Makers Can Facilitate Cooperation in the Public Goods Game

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• 作者：Yen-Sheng Chiang ; Yung-Fong Hsu
• 关键词：Cooperation ; Direct election ; Group decision ; Leadership ; Public goods game
• 刊名：Group Decision and Negotiation
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：26
• 期：1
• 页码：197-213
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Business and Economics
• 刊物主题：Operation Research/Decision Theory; Social Sciences, general;
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1572-9907
• 卷排序：26

文摘

Research on social dilemma has shown that the delegation of decision-making to group leaders can increase cooperation in the collective action problem. In this paper, we show that the voting scheme used for the election of leaders could make a difference to the emergence of cooperation. We design a public goods game experiment in which actors elect leaders to make decisions on their behalf in the contribution to public goods. In particular, we compare the leadership elected from direct and indirect election systems. In direct election, a leader is elected directly by majority-votes from a group, whereas in indirect election the group is divided into smaller subgroups and a leader is elected from the elected subgroup leaders. We run a simulation model to show that direct election would choose a more cooperative leader than indirect election when voters’ preferences of leadership are not homogenous. A laboratory experiment with human subjects further indicates that people hold stronger preferences for cooperators as leaders in direct election than in indirect election, suggesting that the voting scheme has an effect not only on the processing of actors’ preferences, but also on the shaping of their preferences of leadership in the public goods dilemma.