Leadership in Collective Action

• Authors: Esther Hauk and Joan-Maria Esteban.
• BSE Working Paper: 1362 | September 15
• Keywords: Incentives , Leadership , collective contests , group platform , sharing rules
• JEL codes: D70, D72, D74
• Incentives
• Leadership
• collective contests
• group platform
• sharing rules

We extend the model of collective action in which groups compete for a budged by endogenizing the group platform, namely the specifific mixture of public/private good and the distribution of the private good to group members which can be uniform or performance-based. While the group-optimal platform contains a degree of publicness that increases in group size and divides the private benefifits uniformly, a success-maximizing leader uses incentives and distorts the platform towards more private benefifits – a distortion that increases with group size. In both settings we obtain the anti-Olson type result that win probability increases with group size.