Non-willigness to lead and social preference

I investigate if people who want power the least would make different distribution decisions than people who seek it.

Willingness to lead is induced by factors that are not homogeneous in the population. Epitropaki (2018) lists these factors, as these can be genetic, social such as gender (Eckel et al., 2021) and socio-economic status, or psychological. Economics experiments corroborate this point: for instance, individuals with high other-regarding preference and women are less likely to be willing to pay to lead (Ertac et al., 2020). Also, there is a share of the population that negatively perceives power and thus does not seek it (Hull et al., 2022). I am interested in those precise people who, for various reasons, do not seek power or leadership, and I ask two things. First, if and how their personality traits differ from those who seek power, second if they would lead or use power in a different way than those who seek it.

Luhan et al. (2009) show most selfish team members have the strongest influence on a group’s decision, so those who are the most selfish are those who seek leadership, and thus impact more the group’s decision. However, this finding comes from an experimental design that uses a dictator game, a setup where decision-makers' payoffs are involved in the allocation of a lump sum. I aim to assess if there is a difference in distribution preference when the decision-maker incentives are not linked to the decision they make. By distribution preference, I mean the different ways individuals may prefer to allocate resources. Amongst these are overall efficiency (i.e. the sum of all group members’ payoffs), inequality aversion (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999) and maximalisation of the minimum payoff (maximin), as detailed in Engelmann & Strobel (2004). Hence the following research question:

“How does not wanting to lead impact decision-makers’ distribution preferences?”

I investigate if people who want power the least would make different distribution decisions than people who seek it. While one may assume that someone who does not seek power would make better decisions for the group as a whole, so potentially more efficient decisions (H1), it is also possible that, as people who do not seek power have a higher other-regarding preference and are thus more sensitive to guilt, they would rather either foster distributions that optimise equality (H2), or prefer maximin distributions (H3).

2024-02-14

2024-05-31

We will collect data from an incentivized online experiment to answer the following questions:
- RQ1: Do people who do not want to lead have different personality traits than those who want?
H1: people with low willingness to lead are more pro-social
- RQ2: How does not wanting to lead impact decision-makers distribution preferences?
H2: people with low WTL are more likely to make egalitarian distribution decisions.

What is the impact of age, disposable income, gender (see Eckel et al., 2021; Grossman et al., 2019), field of study, native language on participants’ decisions?

We will use an in-lab survey experiment for data collection, implemented at the BaL BARE Laboratory.

The data collection will be conducted using an in-lab survey. We will recruit staff and student participants from Portsmouth University. This will be achieved by reaching out participants from the UoP BARE Lab subject pool and invite them to participate in the experiment. This procedure has been approved previously (Ethics number BAL/2019/11/MURAD).
As is the norm in economic experiments, students will be welcomed to the lab and seated at individual workstations separated by blinds. The instructions will be distributed and read aloud, allowing time for questions before the start of the experiment. All procedures detailed below are common knowledge and will be explained to all participants in full.

We will use Ztree to implement the actual experiment. This experiment will be paired with another one that is currently under review for ethical approval. No interaction between the two experiments is planned, except for the fact participants will receive one showup fee for attending the two experiments. General instructions on lab rules will also be only announced once. The experiment design consists of the following elements:
A. SVO (collected in the previous experiment)
B. Questionnaire, including several willingness lead item and a Big 5 personality test
C. Allocation decision (Engelmann & Strobel, 2004), see section 7.1 for details
In B., participants will make incentivised choices that impact others’ payoffs. No deception will be used. Instructions are in attachment to this form.
D. A Willingness to pay to apply their decision in C, used as an incentivised willingness to lead measure.

Randomisation is conducted at individual level, when registering to the experiment and attending the sessions.

Individual.

No

None.

108

324

We require 108 independent observations per treatment, 324 in total. This number has been computed using G*Power, for a chi-squared test with alpha=5%, beta=20% and a medium effect size w of 0.3.