Doctoral Dissertation Research: Information and Leadership in a Laboratory Setting

领导者是如何领导的？为什么追随者会追随？为什么有些领导者在某些情况下成功，但在其他情况下不成功？虽然学者们早就认识到领导力在社会交往中的重要性，但对这些基本和重要问题的坚实概念把握已被证明是难以捉摸的。然而，这一弱点并不妨碍学术界对领导力重新产生兴趣。领导者是许多当前和著名的经济公司、社会和政治团体、政策产出和政治机构的核心，但我们对领导者-追随者关系的动态理解仍然不完整。本博士论文研究将解决一个基本问题，即领导者如何以及何时可以战略性地利用信息在一组理性的追随者中诱导帕累托增强规范？具体来说，它开发并测试了一系列模型，这些模型明确地将领导信号映射到追随者策略上，并研究了这种映射如何随着一个人系统地改变领导者和追随者互动的环境背景而变化。本研究由两个部分组成。本文首先建立了一系列关于领导者、追随者和领导过程的简单博弈论模型。这些模型提供了一个独特的领导力概念：领导者“领导”，因为他们有能力和动机传播影响追随者战略选择的信息。因此，领导力是领导者传播信息以形成一系列有利于社会的规范的行为和过程。从这些模型中，可以推导出假设，以解决领导者如何以及何时成功地利用信息来影响结果。这些模型既强调了领导者和追随者互动的战略背景，也强调了围绕他们互动的信息条件。第二个部分包括在实验室条件下测试这些模型。博弈论模型严重依赖于“信念”和“信息”等概念，在自然界中非常难以检验。实验设计，通过其巨大的控制水平，提供了具有高水平内部效度的直接测试的潜力。这项调查有望对社会和政治互动中的领导性质提供见解。它将揭示领导者在何种情况下能够有效地利用信息作为他们的交易工具，并将增加我们对为什么个人追随某些领导者而不是其他领导者的理解。

How do leaders lead? Why do followers follow? Why are some leaders successful in some situations but unsuccessful in others? Although scholars have long recognized the importance of leadership in social interaction, a solid conceptual hold on these basic and important questions has proven elusive. This weakness has not precluded, however, a renewed scholarly interest in leadership. Leaders are central to many current and prominent accounts of economic firms, social and political groups, policy outputs, and political institutions, yet our understanding of the dynamics of the leader-follower relationship remains incomplete. This Doctoral Dissertation research will addresses a basic question how and when can leaders strategically employ information to induce a Pareto-enhancing norm among a set of rational followers? Specifically, it develops and tests a series of models that explicitly map leadership signals onto follower strategies, and examines how this mapping changes as one systematically alter the environmental context in which leaders and followers interact. The research consists of two components. In the first, a series of simple game-theoretic models are developed of leaders, followers, and the leadership process. These models offer a distinct conceptualization of leadership: Leaders `lead` because they are able and motivated to disseminate information that affects the strategy selection of followers. Leadership, then, is the act and process by which leaders disseminate information in order to crate a series of socially beneficial norms. From these models, hypotheses are derived to address how and when leaders will successfully employ information to affect outcomes. The models highlight both the strategic context in which leader sand followers interact as well as the informational conditions surrounding their interaction. The second component consists of testing these models under laboratory conditions. Game-theoretic models, critically dependent on such concepts as `beliefs` and `information,` are extraordinarily difficult to test in the natural world. Experimental designs, through their tremendous levels of control, offer the potential of a direct test with a high level of internal validity. This investigation promises to provide insight into the nature of leadership in social and political interaction. It will shed light on the circumstances under which leaders can productively employ information as a tool of their trade, and will increase our understanding of why individuals follow some leaders but not others.