The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation

Abstract

What is leadership? What is good leadership? What is successful leadership? Answers emerge from our study of a formal model in which followers face a coordination problem: they wish to choose the best action while conforming as closely as possible to the actions of others. Although they would like to do the right thing and do it together, followers are unsure about the relative merits of their options. They learn about their environment and the likely moves of others by listening to leaders. These leaders bridge differences of opinion and become coordinating focal points. A leader's influence increases with her judgement (her sense of direction) and her ability to convey ideas (her clarity of communication). A leader with perfect clarity enjoys greater influence than one with a perfect sense of direction. When followers choose how much attention to pay to leaders, they listen only to the most coherent communicators. However, power-hungry leaders who need an audience sometimes obfuscate their messages, but less so when their followers place more emphasis on conformity than on doing the right thing.

Information Use and Acquisition In Price‐Setting Oligopolies

“…Proposition describes equilibrium information acquisition in a symmetric industry (the m notation is dropped as in subsection ). It translates analogous results in Dewan and Myatt () and Myatt and Wallace () to the price‐setting oligopoly context.…”

“…As suppliers become small (increasing M and letting ), the payoff specification fits within the scope of Morris and Shin (), Angeletos and Pavan (), Dewan and Myatt (, ), Myatt and Wallace () and others. The key difference here is the asymmetric setting: the coordination motive (), the target fundamental () and the influence each supplier has on aggregates (via P ) all vary with supplier size.…”

“…6, for instance), the linear equilibrium is unique once mild restrictions are placed on the class of admissible strategy profiles. For example, Dewan and Myatt () proved uniqueness within the class of strategies which are bounded above and below by linear strategies, and noted this approach could be extended to strategies lying between finite‐term polynomial upper and lower bounds. Recently, Ui () showed uniqueness of the linear equilibrium in a related setting but when players’ strategies yield finite first and second moments for the expectations of actions…”

“…In a world with public (perfectly correlated) and private (conditionally uncorrelated) signals about the fundamental, actions react more strongly to public information: such information is more important for higher‐order beliefs. Frameworks like this have been applied extensively: to investment games, to business cycles, to large oligopoly games, to monopolistically competitive suppliers, to political leadership, to financial markets, and to networked communication (Angeletos and Pavan, ; Hellwig, ; Dewan and Myatt, ; Allen et al ., ; Calvó‐Armengol and de Martí, ; Calvó‐Armengol et al ., ; Currarini and Feri, ; Fainmesser and Galeotti, ).…”

The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda

“…Other means include persuasion (Henrich and Gil-White 2001), coordination (Wilson and Rhodes 1997), provision of information (Dewan and Myatt 2008), and leading by example (Levati, Sutter, and van der Heijden 2007). …”