Norms and the evolution of leaders’ followership

• Authors: Antonio Cabrales and Esther Hauk
• Games and Economic Behavior, Vol. 148, 138-161, November 2024

In this paper, we model the interaction between leaders, their followers and crowd followers in a coordination game with local interaction. The steady states of a dynamic best-response process can feature a coexistence of Pareto-dominant and risk-dominant actions in the population. The existence of leaders and their followers, along with the local interaction, which leads to clustering, is crucial for the survival of the Pareto-dominant actions. The evolution of leader and crowd followership shows that leader followership can also be locally stable around Pareto-dominant leaders. The paper answers the questions of which leader should be removed and how to optimally place leaders in the network to enhance payoff-dominant play.