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| Experiments on families |
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"There's lots of experiments on individual choice and a
great deal on interactive choice (i.e. games), but the most
common decision-making unit in the world - the household -
remains largely unused as a test-bed for experiments." I wrote this in 2007 and it's still largely true in 2011. There
are problems with conducting experiments on families -
recruitment is more difficult, compared to experiments with
individuals subjects are more clearly aware of the focus of
the experiment and of course an experiment on established
households is actually a perturbation of a repeated but
unobserved game, so there is always the possibility that
some actions within the laboratory may be undone later at home.
Nevertheless, I still remain convinced that ethical and
informative experiments on family groups can be devised and
so this smallish page is devoted to that aim. Along with
economics experiments it also includes a few links to
psychological work and a small bibliography of related
material from theories of the household, field work etc.
I'm always interested to hear about experiments in this
area that I can add to the page - email:
alistair-munro at grips.ac.jp |
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The roll of honour is small. To my knowledge, the
Elizabeth Peters et al paper is the first
published economics experiment using family groups.
I
worked on a research project with Ian Bateman as part of CSERGE.
We had some theoretical results on the
non-cooperative household and conducted
experiments, testing between competing theories of
household decision-making. After that with the help of an ESRC grant
I ran experiments at Royal Holloway, University of London
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Households.
Ashraf, N.
(2005): Spousal Control and Intra-Household
Decision Making: An Experimental Study in the
Philippines, Job Market Paper no. 1, Harvard
University. A field experiment: looks at the impact of information and transparency on how couples allocated funds into private and joint savings products. Now published in the American Economic Review, vol. 99(4), pages 1245-77, September 2009
Bateman, I. J. and Munro, A., (2003)
Testing Economic Models of the Household: An
Experiment.
The original write-up of our experiment giving details
of the tests of income pooling and Pareto efficiency, now with extra data and revised here.
Bateman, I. J. and Munro, A., (2005) An experiment on risky choice amongst households.
Economic Journal, March (final
draft). This looks at the tests of Expected utility theory which were part of the original experiment.
Couples, it seems, exhibit the same kind of Allais paradoxes as individuals. The papers got rather
more interested in the fact that our couples couldn't agree on how long they'd been together.
The
Guardian's
write-up was the most accurate of the lot, but not
as interesting as the
Sunday Times' innovative extension of
the research using a sample of 1 accompanied by a
picture of Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
Bateman, I. J. and Munro, A., (2005)
Household versus individual valuation: what's the difference?
This paper follows up our experimental work by
seeing if we get differences between household
valuation and individual valuation in a fairly
standard contingent valuation framework. Indeed we
do. Now published (2009) in a special edition of Environmental and Resource Economics.
Carlsson, Fredrik & Martinsson, Peter & Qin, Ping & Sutter, Matthias, 2009. Household Decision Making and the Influence of Spouses' Income, Education, and Communist Party Membership: A Field Experiment in Rural China
IZA Discussion Papers 4139, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Compares risky decisions made separately and jointly by a
sample of householders in a rural area of Guizhou province, south-west China. Finds that men have the most influence on joint decisions.
Cochard, François & Couprie, Hélène & Hopfensitz, Astrid, 2009. Do Spouses Cooperate? And If Not: Why? TSE Working Papers 09-134, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE). A detailed
study of 100 French couples and their joint and separate attitudes to risk.
de Palma Andre, Nathalie Picard and Anthony Ziegelmeyer, (2007)
Individual and Couple Decision Behavior under Risk:The Power of Ultimate Control
Who controls the mouse controls the outcome of joint choice. Now published in Theory and Decison.
Iversen,
Vegard* Cecile
Jackson, Bereket
Kebede, Alistair
Munro and Arjan
Verschoor, (2006)
What’s love got to do with it?
An experimental test of household models in East
Uganda.
Along with
the picture above, there's
also a brief
movie of Arjan's
explanation of the experiment to participants in
Sironko. Now forthcoming as "Iversen, V., C. Jackson, B. Kebede, A. Munro, and A. Verschoor, 2010, Do Spouses Realise Cooperative Gains? Experimental Evidence from Rural Uganda, World Development".
Pamela Jakiela and Owen Ozier, 2011, Does Africa Need a Rotten Kin Theorem?
Experimental Evidence from Village EconomiesWorking Paper, WUSTL.
A sample of rural Kenyans can invest in a lottery then have the opportunity to hide, at some cost, their winnings from relatives and others taking part in the experiment. They find that women with relatives present are most likely to pay to hide.
Kebede,Bereket, Marcela Tarazona, Alistair Munro and Arjan Verschoor, 2011, Intra-household efficiency: An experimental study from Ethiopia.WPS/2011-01
A sample of 1200 couples in 3 geographically distinct sites is used to test theories of the household. Efficiency is rejected.
Mani, Anand, 2008, Mine, Yours or Ours: The Efficiency of Household Investment Decisions -- an Experimental Approach, Working Paper, Warwick University Economics Department.
uses 300 couples in rural Andhra Pradesh,India. Players typically face 4 tasks including
one baseline task where they must split 50 rupees between a high return and a low return account (with the share going to each spouse fixed) and
another task in which subjects split 50 rupees between a high return investment that goes to the spouse's private account or a low return account
that stays with the investor. She finds that the separated spouses typically invest 70% to 80% of their investment in the high paying account that
goes to the partner. Crucially, she has a full information and private information variations which make little difference to the results.
She suggests that husbands in particular play spitefully rather than investing to maximize household returns.
Munro, A., I. J. Bateman and Tara McNally, (2008)
The Family Under the Microscope.
Does transparency make a difference to couples' decisions? In the UK it doesn't.
Munro, A., Tara McNally and Danail Popov, (2008),
Taking it in turns.
Couples take it in turn to win disputed decisions. The idea is that couples use behaviour in disputes to maintain relationship capital. So preferences are not just defined over goods,
they are influenced by the desire to signal affection, understanding etc.
Munro, Alistair, Bereket Kebede, Marcela Tarazona-Gomez and Arjan Verschoor, (2010), The lion’s share. An experimental analysis of polygamy in Northern Nigeria. Grips Discussion Paper, Report No. : 10-27
From the ESRC/DfID data. Using samples of polygamous and non-polygamous households from villages in rural areas south of Kano, Northern Nigeria we test basic theories of household behaviour. Husbands and wives play two variants of a
voluntary contributions game in which endowments are private knowledge, but contributions are public. In one variant, the common pool is split equally. In the other treatment the husband allocates the pool (and wives are forewarned of this).
Second wives do worse from this allocation, but men earn more under polygyny.
Munro, Alistair Bereket Kebede, Marcela Tarazona-Gomez and Arjan Verschoor, 2011,
Autonomy or Efficiency. An experiment on household decisions in two regions of India Reference number: 11-02.
Dyson and Moore (1983) posit that women in South India enjoy relatively more agency than in the North.
Their conclusions have become part of the standard picture of Indian rural society.
We take a sample of 1200 couples from two areas in the north of India (Uttar Pradesh) and one area in the south (Tamil Nadu)
that are often taken to exemplify differences in the autonomy of women and the nature of marital relationships. Generally,
we find large-scale and robust evidence of inefficiency and the hiding of assets when this is possible. Men invest more and
are more generous to their partners. There are some differences between response
to treatment but the key and striking difference between the North and the South is that in both rural and urban sites
in the former region household efficiency is considerably greater than in the latter, which does on the face of it suggest
a tradeoff between autonomy and efficiency.
Peters, E. H., A. N. Unur, J. Clark and W.D. Schulze (2004):
Free-Riding and the Provision of Public Goods in the Family: A Laboratory Experiment, International Economic Review, 45 (1), pp.
283-199. The sample is a mix of parents and children, often
with only one parent present. Subjects play (repeated) common pool games in groups of 4. Children free ride more than parents.
Robinson, Jonathan, (2008)
Limited Insurance Within the Household: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya
Interesting field study on risk sharing for a sample of
Kenyan households which traces the impact on spending and sharing of
separate shocks to male and female income.
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Testing theories of the household.
With
some (ex-) colleagues from the
School of Development
Studies at the University of East Anglia, we tested
some of the main theories of the household in Uganda.
We currently have a grant from the ESRC-DFID to conduct more extensive experiments in India, Ethiopia and Nigeria.
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Other
groups.
Bone, John, John Hey
and John Suckling, 1999, Are Groups More or Less
Consistent Than Individuals?, Journal of Risk and
Uncertainty, 8, 63-81.
Bone, John, John Hey
and John Suckling, 2000, A Simple Risk-Sharing
Experiment, University of York Discussion papers in
Economics, No. 2000/36.
Güth
W., Ivanova-Stenzel R., Sutter M., Weck-Hannemann H.
(2003): 'Investment and bargaining in joint ventures:
a family decision making experiment', Journal of
Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 159
(2), pp. 323–41.
Güth, Werner Radosveta Ivanova-Stenze
and Sigve Tjotta,
2004,
Please, Marry Me! An Experimental Study of Risking a
Joint Venture
Metroeconomica,
Volume 55 Page 1 -
February 2004
Harbaugh, W., K. Krause and T. Berry, 2001, "GARP for Kids:
On the Development of Rational Choice Behavior,"
American Economic Review, December.
Hill, G. W. (1982),
Group vs. Individual Performance: Are N+1 Heads Better
than One? Psychological Bulletin, 91, 517-539.
Kocher,
Martin G. Matthias Sutter, 2005, The Decision Maker
Matters: Individual Versus Group Behaviour in
Experimental Beauty-Contest Games, The Economic
Journal, Volume 115, Issue 500, Page 200-123,
Jan |
Other economics experiments.
Of firmly related interest is the work by
Bill
Harbaugh and
colleagues at the U. of Oregon on children's
decision-making. I've put in only one reference but
many more can be found by following the link.
There is also a much larger literature on group
decision-making much of which is concerned with
comparing group-decisions to those made by
individuals, but some of it can be usefully compared to
what happens in the household.
I've included in this category a series of papers by
a group at the
Max Planck institute
who pair male and female student subjects and then test
induced theories of behaviour.
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| Social Psychology Experiments.
Beatty, Sharon E.
and Salil Talpade (1994), “Adolescent Influence in
Family Decision making: A Replication and
Extension,” Journal of Consumer Research, 21
(September), 332-341.
Corfman,
Kim. P. and Donald. R. Lehmann, (1987): Models of
cooperative group decision-making and relative
influence: An experimental investigation of family
purchase decisions. Journal of Consumer Research,
14: 1-13.
Corfman, Kim P.
(1987), “Group Decision Making and Relative
Influence When Preferences Differ: A Conceptual
Framework,” in Research in Consumer Behavior,
Vol. 2,
Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Jagdish N. Sheth, eds.,
Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 223‑257.
Davis, Harry L.
(1976), “Decision Making within the Household,”
Journal of Consumer Research, 2 (March), 241-160.
Qualls, William J.
(1987), “Household Decision Behavior: The Impact of
Husbands’ and Wives’ Sex Role Orientation,” Journal
of Consumer Research, 14 (September), 264-179.
Spiro, Rosann L.
(1983), “Persuasion in Family Decision-Making,”
Journal of Consumer Research, 9 (March), 393-402. |
Psychology.
Social psychology and
consumer behaviour research throws up some interesting
behaviour albeit usually in the context of
hypothetical experiments which are asking for
replication with real incentives. I include in this list the work of Kim Corfman and Donald Lehmann which set the agenda for experiments on household decisions. |
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Contingent Valuation and Choice Experiments.
Bateman, I. J. and Munro, A., (2005)
Household versus individual valuation: what's the difference?
This paper follows up our experimental work by
seeing if we get differences between household
valuation and individual valuation in a fairly
standard contingent valuation framework. Indeed we
do.
Dosman, Donna & Wiktor Adamowicz (2006),
Combining Stated and Revealed Preference Data to Construct an Empirical Examination of Intrahousehold Bargaining, Review of Household Economics.
Lindhjem, Henrik & Navrud, Ståle, (2008)
Asking for Individual or Household Willingness to Pay for Environmental Goods? Implication for aggregate welfare measures
Marcella Veronesi & Martina Menon & Federico Perali, (2007),
Extension of the Traditional Travel Cost Method to a Collective Framework: An Empirical Application of Household Economics.
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Valuation
Environmental valuation provided the original motivation for our work. We wanted to know if it made a difference whether an
individual or househould provided measures of valuation such as willingness to pay. There are a now a number of papers that consider this or related issues.
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Theory.
2002 (with I. Bateman) Non-cooperative decision-making and measures of household
surplus. Paper given at 2nd World Congress of Environmental
and Resource Economics, Monterey, 2002.
Our original paper on the relationship between
theories of the household and measures of surplus.
Becker, G.
(1965): A Theory of the Allocation of Time,
Economic Journal, 75, 493-517.
Becker,
Gary S., (1974): A theory of social interactions,
Journal of Political Economy, vol. 82 (6),
1063-1093.
Bergstrom,
T. C., (1989), A fresh look at the rotten kid
theorem and other household mysteries, Journal
of Political Economy, 97(5), 1138-1159.
Bergstrom, T. C., L. Blume and H.
Varian, (1986), On the private provision of public
goods, Journal of Public Economics, 29, 25-49.
Bolin, K., L. Jacobson and B.
Lindgren, (2002), The family as the health producer -
when spouses act strategically, Journal of Health
Economics, 21: 475-495.
Chen Z. and F. Woolley, (2001), A
Cournot-Nash Model of Family Decision-making,
Economic. Journal.,111, 722-748.
Kandori, M., (2002), Introduction
to Repeated Games with Private Monitoring, Journal
of Economic Theory, 102, 1-15.
Ligon,
(2002): Dynamic Bargaining in Households (with an
application to Bangladesh), Department of
Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of
California at Berkeley.
Lundberg,
S. and R. Pollak (1993): Separate spheres
bargaining and the marriage market, Journal of
Political Economy, 101, pp. 988-1010.
Lundberg S. J.,
Pollak R. A. (1996): 'Bargaining and distribution
in marriage',
Journal of
Economic Perspectives, 10, pp. 139–58.
Manser, M
and M. Brown (1980): Marriage and Household
Decision-Making: A Bargaining Analysis,
International Economic Review, 21 (1), pp.
31-44.
McElroy, M.
and M. J. Horney (1981): Nash-Bargained Household
Decisions: Toward a generalisation of the theory of
demand, International Economic Review, 22
(2).
2005 Household willingness to pay equals individual willingness to pay if and only if the household income pools.
Economics Letters (final draft).
The title is fairly self-explanatory, this paper
provides the theoretical background to the contingent
valuation study.
Quiggin, J., (1998), Individual
and household willingness to pay for public goods,
American Journal of Agricultural Economics,
80, 58-63.
Sen, A.
(1990), “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts”, Chapter
8 in Persistent Inequalities: Women and World
Development, edited by I. Tinker, Oxford,
Oxford University Press.
Strand J. and S. Aabø, , (2002),
Public-good valuation and intrafamily allocation,
Department of Economics Working Paper, University of
Oslo, Norway
Ulph, D.
(1988): A General Non-Cooperative Model of
Household Behaviour, mimeo, University of Bristol.
Warr, P. G., (1983) The private
provision of a public good is independent of the
distribution of income, Economics Letters,
13, 207-11.
Woolley, F.
(1988): A non-cooperative model of family
decision-making, Working Paper TIDI/125, London
School of Economics.
Formal empirical tests.
Alderman,
H., P. A. Chiappori, L. Haddad, J. Hoddinott and R.
Kanbur (1995): Unitary vs. Collective models of the
household: Is it time to shift the burden of proof
?, World Bank Research Observer, 10 (1), pp.
1-19.
Behrman, J.
(1988): Nutrition, Health, Birth Order and
Seasonality: Intrahousehold Allocation among
Children in Rural India, Journal of Development
Economics, 28 (7), pp. 42-63.
Browning,
Martin, and Pierre-Andre Chiappori, (1998):
Efficient intra-household allocations: a general
characterisation and empirical tests.
Econometrica 66 (6), 1241–1278.
Doss, C., (1996), Testing among
models of intrahousehold resource allocation,
World Development, 24(10), 1597-1609.
Haddad, L.,
J. Hoddinott and H. Alderman (1997):
Intrahousehold resource allocation in developing
countries: Methods, models and policy, John
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Hoddinott,
J. and L. Haddad (1995): “Does female income share
influence household expenditure patterns ?,”
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 57
(1), pp. 77-96.
Jones, C.
W. (1983): Mobilisation of women’s labour for cash
crop production: a game theoretic approach,
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 65
(5), pp. 1049-1054.
Lampietti, J., (1999) Do
husbands and wives make the same choices? Evidence
from Northern Ethiopia, Economics. Letters,
62 (2): 253-160.
Lundberg,
Shelly J., Robert A. Pollak and Terence J. Wales,
(1997): Do Husbands and Wives Pool Their Resources?
Evidence from the United Kingdom Child Benefit,
Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 32, No. 3.
(Summer,), pp. 463-480.
Phipps,
Shelley A., and Burton Peter S., (1998): What's
Mine is yours? The influence of male and female
incomes on patterns of household expenditure,
Economica, 65, 599-613.
Thomas, D.
(1990): “Intrahousehold resource allocations – an
inferential approach,” Journal of Human
Resources, 25, pp. 635-64.
Udry, C.
(1996): “Gender, Agricultural Production and the
Theory of the Household,” Journal of Political
Economy, 104 (5), pp. 1010-1046.
Other.
Farmer, A.
and J. Tiefenhaler (1995): “Fairness concepts and
the intrahousehold allocation of resources,”
Journal of Development Economics, 47, pp.
179-189.
Pahl, Jan,
(1990): Household spending, personal spending and
the control of money in marriage, Sociology,
24:1, 119-138.
Woolley,
Frances, (2000): Control over Money in Marriage,
Carleton Economic Papers 0-07.
Burgoyne, C.B., Clarke, V., & Reibstein, J. 2003,
‘”All my worldly goods I share with you”? Ownership
and management of money in couples about to be
married.’ Paper presented at 2003 IAREP Conference
on Household Economic Decisions: Earning, Sharing,
Spending and Investing Money, Agder College,
Kristiansand, Norway, Dec. 5th-7th |
Other related material
This is a mixture
of theory, some of the fieldwork and econometrics
which tests theories of the household and a few
observational studies which I've placed under the
inspired heading of 'other'. In many
instances these provide the most interesting
material for future experimental work and new
theories.
In the latter group,
Carol Burgoyne at
Exeter is worth mentioning for the interesting work
she's doing on money management in couples. |
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Email:
alistair-munro at grips.ac.jp |
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