This paper explores the effect of personality traits on: (1) the willingness to make risk-taking decisions on behalf of a group, (2) the nature of "choice shifts", i.e. the difference between the amount of risk taken in the group context and individually. Openness and agreeableness emerge as...

We report results from a laboratory experiment that explores the effects of preference communication and leader selection mechanisms in group decision-making. In a setting where all members of a group get the same payoff based on the group leader's decision of how much risk to take, we study the...

In this paper we analyze the optimal degree of centralization for the supply of public goods. We identify the reliance on an exclusion mechanism as a central feature of the decentralized provision of public goods. An exclusion mechanism induces a contest between users of the public goods who...