科学研究

Jonathan Tan is an Associate Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Since 2000, he has taught at Oxford, Frankfurt, Nottingham, and Singapore, and has held various strategic management roles such as Assistant Chair (Internship, Exchange, Alumni, and Communications) and Research Director of the Economic Growth Centre at Nanyang Tech, Director of UG Industrial Economics at Nottingham, and Founding Director of The Centre for Research in the Behavioural Sciences and CRIBS Lab.

Jonathan’s research concerns behavioral and experimental economics. He has published in journals such as American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, European Economic Review, Economic Theory, Experimental Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and Games and Economic Behavior. He serves as Associate Editor of the Economic Psychology section of Applied Psychology: An International Review, and is a Member of the Editorial Board at Journal of Economic Psychology.

We analyze the effects of leadership by endogenous task choice on cooperation in teams of individuals with heterogeneous abilities across task options. A leader first chooses a task for the team, and its members then make sequential contributions choices. Our experiment shows that contributions increase when tasks are initiated by a leader instead of exogenously by Nature, and in stable teams. Leaders cooperate more, even in costlier tasks, as do followers. The observed task choices elicit more efficiency especially in repeated games; participants alternate between tasks when it also achieves equity across games. These results indicate the engagement effects of endogenously chosen tasks and stable partnerships that transform social preferences. We theoretically discuss this with examples such as on how leaders are more willing to accept disadvantageous inequity and more likely to pick efficient and equitable tasks and trust or reciprocate, while followers respond to leadership with reciprocity or trust, respectively.