Doctoral Dissertation Research: Information and Leadership in a Laboratory Setting

领导者如何领导？ 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，而在另一些情况下失败？ 虽然学者们早就认识到领导力在社会交往中的重要性，但事实证明，对这些基本和重要问题的坚实概念把握是难以捉摸的。 然而，这一弱点并没有阻止学术界对领导力重新产生兴趣。 领导者是许多关于经济企业、社会和政治团体、政策产出和政治机构的当前和重要叙述的核心，但我们对领导者-追随者关系的动态的理解仍然是不完整的。 这个博士论文的研究将解决一个基本的问题，如何以及何时领导者可以战略性地利用信息，以诱导一组理性的追随者之间的帕累托增强规范？ 具体来说，它开发和测试了一系列模型，明确映射领导信号到追随者的战略，并检查如何映射变化作为一个系统地改变环境的背景下，领导者和追随者的互动。 研究由两部分组成。 在第一部分中，我们建立了一系列关于领导者、追随者和领导过程的简单博弈模型。这些模型提供了一个独特的概念化的领导：领导者“领导”，因为他们能够和动机传播信息，影响战略选择的追随者。因此，领导力是领导者传播信息以创造一系列有益于社会的规范的行为和过程。 从这些模型中，假设推导出如何以及何时领导者将成功地利用信息影响结果。 该模型突出了领导者和追随者互动的战略背景以及围绕他们互动的信息条件。 第二部分是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测试。 实验设计，通过其巨大的控制水平，提供了一个直接测试的潜力与高水平的内部效度。 这项研究有望提供洞察领导的性质，在社会和政治互动。 它将揭示领导者在何种情况下可以有效地利用信息作为交易工具，并将增加我们对为什么个人会追随一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.