The objective of this thesis is to assess the prospects of leadership in the provision of public goods like climate change mitigation theoretically and empirically. The thesis is divided in four major sections. The theoretical Section I is based on classical narrow payoff maximizing economic agents and makes use of the Aggregative Game Approach (Cornes and Hartley 2007, Cornes 2016). Chapter 1 considers pioneering behaviour in coalition building and the resulting incentive effect on another group to form a coalition whereas Chapter 2 sheds light on the effects that technology transfers exert on the choice of a contribution technology by a group of countries. Chapter 3 addresses the question whether the sequential provision of a public good (in a Stackelberg game) increases public good supply as compared to simultaneous provision (in a Nash game) if one of two countries has the possibility to adopt an improved contribution technology. The theoretical analysis in Section I is complemented in Section II by an empirical example concerning leadership in technological progress of solar energy through its subsidization in Germany. The two remaining parts then move away from narrow payoff-maximizing agents. Both in public discussion and economic literature reciprocity is regarded as a key to successful cooperation and successful leadership. Consequently, Section III addresses the scope of reciprocity in economic experiments as well as in international relations (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 then investigates in an online experiment on MTurk the within-subject stability of reciprocal patterns across classification methods using a sequential public goods game (Fischbacher et al. 2001) on the one hand and a sequential prisoner’s dilemma (e.g. Miettinen et al. 2017) on the other hand. The final Section IV deals with the question whether it can be expected that leading-by-example is able to increase public good supply. A meta-analysis of the existing literature in Chapter 7 as well as a lab experiment that incorporates leadership in a dynamic public goods game with endowment carryover (Gächter et al. 2017) in Chapter 8 provide some answers to this question
