TY  - JOUR
AU  - Blinder,Alan S.
AU  - Morgan,John
TI  - Leadership in Groups: A Monetary Policy Experiment
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13391
PY  - 2007
Y2  - September 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13391
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13391.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alan S. Blinder
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
Tel: 609/258-3358
Fax: 609/258-5398
E-Mail: blinder@princeton.edu

John Morgan
Haas School, UC, Berkeley
545 Student Services Building, #1900
Berkeley, CA 94720-1900
E-Mail: morgan@haas.berkeley.edu
AB  - In an earlier paper (Blinder and Morgan, 2005), we created an experimental apparatus in which Princeton University students acted as ersatz central bankers, making monetary policy decisions both as individuals and in groups. In this study, we manipulate the size and leadership structure of monetary policy decisionmaking. We find no evidence of superior performance by groups that have designated leaders. Groups without such leaders do as well as or better than groups with well-defined leaders. Furthermore, we find rather little difference between the performance of four-person and eight-person groups; the larger groups outperform the smaller groups by a very small margin. Finally, we successfully replicate our Princeton results, at least qualitatively: Groups perform better than individuals, and they do not require more "time" to do so.
ER  -