Leadership and Overcoming Coordination Failure

该奖项资助了一项研究，该研究测试了有关领导力如何工作以减少协调失败的经济学理论。协调失败是影响许多组织的常见问题。例如，单个人的薄弱努力可能会拖累整个团队的表现。装配线的速度不会快于生产线上最慢的人，或者直到最后一个人完成他们的部分，一份报告才能完成。有潜在“薄弱环节”的组织容易陷入生产力陷阱，所有人都付出很少的努力。领导力是管理和促进向更好结果过渡的过程的天然工具。私人投资机构及其合作者对协调和领导之间的关系有着长期的兴趣。以前的研究表明，有能力的领导者可以增加成功协调的几率，但强加一个领导者并不是万能的。成功的几率取决于谁是领导者，他们是如何被挑选出来的，他们拥有哪些工具，以及他们如何行使自己的领导力。我们提出了三个项目，这三个项目着眼于新的环境，在这些环境中，协调和领导是重要的，并审查了以前未曾检验过的使领导人更有效的机制。(1)集中管理与分散管理：考虑一家有两个部门的公司。这些部门可以通过协调其活动而获益，但每个部门都有关于世界状况的私人信息，而且至关重要的是，这两个部门的利益并不完全一致。让中央经理从部门收集信息并将选择强加给部门是更好的做法，还是让部门共享信息并单独做出决策更好？集中管理在很大程度上消除了各司面临的协调问题，但使各司有动机扭曲其向中央管理人员提交的报告，导致结果不太理想。Alonso、Dessein和Matouschek(2008)表明，在广泛的条件下，分权可以最大化企业利润，但这一结果依赖于可能不现实的行为假设。该奖项为简化阿隆索等人的环境的实验提供资金，通过消除部门之间的信息不对称来反对集中化。PI们推测，即使在一个与集中化背道而驰的环境中，与理论相反，使用集中化管理的公司也会比采用分散管理的公司表现更好。(2)领导力和建议：想象一群投资者独立选择是否将他们的资金投入到投资机会中。投资的回报取决于投资者的数量和未知的世界状况。投资者从一位了解世界状况的顾问那里得到建议，但在不符合投资者最佳利益的情况下，他们有动机建议投资。反复的互动迫使顾问在欺骗投资者的短期收益与维护信誉的长期担忧之间做出协调。私人投资机构进行实验，研究顾问是否能够成功地利用他们的优势信息在有效均衡上产生协调。他们计划将这项实验的结果与经济政策制定者在试图让一个国家走出目前影响美国的衰退时面临的一些问题联系起来。(3)学会领导：领导人可以帮助团体克服协调失败。尽管如此，许多有领导人的团体未能就有效的结果进行协调。这不仅是因为运气不好，也是因为领导人犯了系统性的错误。由于特定的错误是可以识别的，如果坏的领导者能够学习(或被教导)避免这些错误，那么他们就可以转变为优秀的领导者，这似乎是有道理的。第三个项目使用经济学实验来考察提高领导者绩效的可能方法：直接经验、间接经验和几种不同的建议。智慧的优点：理解领导者如何在各种环境中发挥作用，是提高我们对组织如何实现有效协调的知识的核心。除了扩大我们对领导力的认识之外，这里提出的研究还旨在改进制度的设计和领导者的培训，以降低生产率陷阱持续存在的可能性。预期的更广泛影响：协调问题在许多经济失败中扮演着重要角色。简而言之，经济可能是一个自我实现的预言。如果人们认为经济将表现不佳，它就会表现不佳。这里提出的工作旨在帮助领导人制定制度和战略，使其更容易摆脱生产力陷阱。根据拟议的研究开发的软件和技术应该有助于教授各种各样的经济学和商业课程。研究助理将接受有价值的培训。

This award funds research that tests economic theories about how leadership can work to reduce coordination failures. Coordination failure is a common problem affecting many organizations. For example, a single individual's weak effort can drag down the performance of an entire group. An assembly line moves no faster than the slowest person in the line or a report doesn?t get finished until the last person completes their section. Organizations with a potential 'weak link' are prone to being caught in productivity traps where all individuals exert low effort. Leadership is a natural tool for managing and facilitating the process of transitioning to a better outcome. The PIs and their collaborators have a long standing interest in the relationship between coordination and leadership. Previous research demonstrates that able leaders can increase the odds of successful coordination, but imposing a leader is not a cure-all. The odds of success depend on who the leader is, how they are selected, the tools they have available, and how they exercise their leadership. We propose three projects which look at new environments in which coordination and leadership are important and examine previously untested mechanisms for making leaders more effective. (1) Centralized vs. Decentralized Management: Consider a firm with two divisions. The divisions can gain by coordinating their activities but each division has private information about the state of the world and, critically, the interests of the two divisions are not perfectly aligned. Is it better to have a central manager collect information from the divisions and impose choices on the divisions or to have the divisions share information and make decisions separately? Centralized management largely eliminates the coordination problem facing the divisions, but gives the divisions incentives to distort their reports to the central manager, leading to suboptimal outcomes. Alonso, Dessein, and Matouschek (2008) show that decentralization maximizes firm profits under broad conditions, but this result relies on behavioral assumptions that may be unrealistic. This award funds experiments that simplify the environment of Alonso et al, stacking the deck against centralization by eliminating information asymmetries between the divisions. The PIs conjecture that even in an environment biased against centralization, and contrary to theory, companies that use centralized management will outperform firms with a decentralized approach. (2) Leadership and Advice: Imagine a group of investors independently choosing whether to put their money into an investment opportunity. The return of the investment depends on the number of investors and an unknown state of the world. The investors receive advice from an adviser who knows the state of the world, but has incentives to suggest investment when it is not in the investors' best interest. Repeated interaction forces the adviser to reconcile short term gains from deceiving investors with a long-term concern for maintaining credibility. The PIs conduct experiments to study whether advisers can successfully use their superior information to generate coordination on an efficient equilibrium. They plan to relate the results of this experiment with some of the problems facing economic policy makers as they try to lift a country out of a recession like the one currently affecting the U.S.(3) Learning to Lead: Leaders can help groups overcome coordination failure. Nonetheless many groups with leaders fail to coordinate on an efficient outcome. This occurs not just because of bad luck, but also because leaders make systematic errors. Because specific errors can be identified, it seems plausible that bad leaders can be transformed into good ones if they can learn (or can be taught) to avoid these errors. The third project uses economic experiments to examine possible ways of improving leaders' performance: direct experience, indirect experience, and several different varieties of advice.Intellectual Merit: Understanding how leaders function in a variety of settings is central to improving our knowledge of how organizations can achieve efficient coordination. Beyond an expansion our knowledge of leadership, the research presented here is intend to improve the design of institutions and the training of leaders to make it less likely that a productivity trap will persist. Expected Broader Impact: Coordination problems play an important role in many economic failures. Put simply, the economy can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people believe the economy is going to do poorly, it will. The work proposed here is intended to help develop institutions and strategies for leaders that will make it easier to escape from productivity traps. Software and techniques developed with the proposed research should be useful in teaching a wide variety of economics and business courses. Research assistants will receive valuable training.