Abstract
Collective decisions in the real world rarely occur in isolation but within systems where authority shapes norms, expectations, and outcomes. While extensive research has examined leadership in cooperative behavior, the distinct influence of authority, in particular how its legitimacy affects compliance remains underexplored. This gap is especially critical in environmental dilemmas where technical solutions require deeper understanding of human behavioral responses to different sources of power.
This study investigates how different sources of authority influence rule compliance in a public bad game, and how the authorities themselves perceive the sources of power. Authorities are randomly assigned to one of four sources of power (Consensus, Merit, Random, or Win-the-Struggle) and set a rule r ∈ {0,1,…,10}. Group members make conditional compliance choices using the strategy method and are paid according to the rule actually chosen by their Authority. Since the rule is payoff-neutral, any systematic variation in compliance identifies non-monetary motives.
Experimental setup
Our experimental design consists of two distinct experiments conducted in the following order:
(i) the Authority Side (Part_one), where a series of tasks are performed and rules are collected; and (ii) the Group Member Side (Part_two), where participants play a Public Bad Game (PBG) in groups of five using the strategy method. More specifically, we run treatments that vary the source of power associated with each Authority.
We study how different sources of power affect rule compliance. The treatments are defined as follows:
T1. Random Selection: Group members receive rules from an Authority randomly selected.
T2. Consensus Selection: Group members receive rules from an Authority elected by majority rule.
T3. Merit Selection: Group members receive rules from an Authority who won a selection based on a combination of an IQ test and an effort task.
T4. Win-the-Struggle Selection: Group members receive rules from an Authority who won an all-pay auction.
Hypotheses:
H_1: The distribution of rule choices in Part_one is identical across all sources of power (Random, Consensus, Merit, Win-the-Struggle).
Test: We will compare the distribution of rules chosen by Authorities across treatments using an appropriate non-parametric test.
H_2: The group members’ absolute deviations in Part_two are distributed in the same way across all sources of power.
Test: We will compare the distribution of deviations ( D_i=| x_i − r | ) across the four power sources using an appropriate non-parametric test.
H_3: The behavioural types in Part_two are distributed in the same way across all sources of power.
Test: We will classify subjects into behavioural types according to the shape of their conditional compliance function (investment decisions as function of rule levels). Then, we will compare the distribution of these behavioural types across treatments using an appropriate non-parametric test.
Auxiliary hypotheses:
AH_4: We test whether lower deviations are associated with higher (unconditional) intrinsic respect for rule, as measured by compliance in the Y Task used in Bicchieri, C., Gächter, S., Molleman, L., & Nosenzo, D. (2025).
AH_5: We test whether lower deviations are associated with higher descriptive and normative beliefs.
AH_6. Conditional on the rule level r, investment decisions in the Public Bad Game do not differ across sources of power.