JENA ECONOMIC RESEARCH PAPERS # 2011 – 066 Leading by Words in Privileged Groups

Koukoumelis et al. (2010, 2012) have shown that one-way communication enhances contributions to public goods. We investigate the effectiveness of one-way communication, when the benefits from the public good are asymmetric and the sender of a message is the main beneficiary of cooperation. Our results show that, in the absence of communication opportunities, contribution behavior may be inversely related to other group members’ marginal benefits from the public good. The effectiveness of one-way communication, however, remains unaffected even though compliance with a sender’s suggestion to cooperate generates unfavorable payoff inequalities for message receivers. The results also indicate that one-way messages have to relate to the experimental game to enhance cooperation. Merely “giving someone a voice” is not sufficient.