Communication, leadership and coordination failure

Abstract

We investigate the limits of communication and leadership in avoiding coordination failure in minimum effort games. Our environment is challenging, with low benefits of coordination relative to the effort cost. We consider two leader types: cheap-talk leader-communicators who suggest an effort level, and first-mover leaders who lead by example. Both types of leadership have some ability to increase effort in groups with no history, but are insufficient in groups with a history of low effort. Using the strategy method for followers' responses, we attribute the persistence of coordination failure to the presence of followers who do not follow the leader.

Let's Talk It Over: Communication and Coordination in Teams

“…Our model's predictions also match key findings from the experimental literature on team coordination and communication: For example, we provide an explanation to the striking differences documented between experiments with costly and costless communication, and why making communication mandatory or fully compensating the costs of communication is much more effective than providing large, partial subsidies (Blume and Ortmann, 2007;Kriss, Blume and Weber, 2016). Our results also shed light on why letting a team leader handle communication may improve outcomes over a no-communication situation but should not be expected to fully solve the coordination problem, and why "lead by example" and letting a team leader communicate voluntarily have similar results (Cartwright, Gillet and Van Vugt, 2013;Sahin, Eckel and Komai, 2015;Dong, Montero and Possajennikov, 2017).…”

“…An alternative way to coordinate agents is to elevate a single agent to become the team leader. We model the team leader routine in a similar way as in the experiments of Cartwright, Gillet and Van Vugt (2013), Dong, Montero and Possajennikov (2017), and Sahin, Eckel and Komai (2015): let agent 1 be the team leader and let the communication stage consist of agent 1 sending a message while no other agent can communicate. We use the same conditions on beliefs as before; in the communication phase, π now represents the team leader's belief that a message will change other team members decisions about which actions to take.…”

“…Both routines substantially improve outcomes in the weakest-link game, but are not significantly different from one another. Dong, Montero and Possajennikov (2017) examine the same two routines, but find that neither leading by example, nor pre-action communication by the team leader is enough to escape coordination failure, although teams do slightly better under both routines than in a no-communication treatment. The difference between the two experiments lies primarily in the incentive structure as the incentives are weaker in Dong, Montero and Possajennikov (2017).…”

“…Dong, Montero and Possajennikov (2017) examine the same two routines, but find that neither leading by example, nor pre-action communication by the team leader is enough to escape coordination failure, although teams do slightly better under both routines than in a no-communication treatment. The difference between the two experiments lies primarily in the incentive structure as the incentives are weaker in Dong, Montero and Possajennikov (2017). 16 Cartwright, Gillet and Van Vugt (2013) examine only leading by example, and occupy a middle ground in the game's parameters.…”

“…Dong, Montero and Possajennikov (2017) use groups of four, andSahin, Eckel and Komai (2015) groups of six, suggesting that the incentives are more important in these short-run cases.…”