Experiments on families
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Experiments on families

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. 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 actions within the laboratory may be undone later at home. 

Nevertheless, I 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

Household Experiments Other relevant economic experiments Some psychology Related material Contingent Valuation and Choice experiments

The roll of honour is small. To my knowledge, the Elizabeth Peters et al paper is the first published experiment using family groups. The sample is a mix of parents and children, often with only one parent present.

Households.

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.

Robinson, Jonathan, (2008) Limited Insurance Within the Household: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya Interesting study on risk sharing for a sample of Kenyan households

Decision-making within the household and its implication for measures of consumer surplus.
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

Andre de Palma, 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

 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.

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.

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.

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.

Ashraf, N. (2005): Spousal Control and Intra-Household Decision Making: An Experimental Study in the Philippines, Job Market Paper no. 1, Harvard University.

The impact of information and transparency on how couples allocated funds into private and joint savings products.

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. 283-299.

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.

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 200-223, 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.

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), 241-260.

Qualls, William J. (1987), “Household Decision Behavior: The Impact of Husbands’ and Wives’ Sex Role Orientation,” Journal of Consumer Research, 14 (September), 264-279.

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.

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.

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.

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): 253-260.

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