Equality-Efficiency Trade-off within French and German Couples – A Comparative Experimental Study

Hélène Couprie (), Miriam Beblo, Denis Beninger, Francois Cochard and Astrid Hopfensitz

No 2012-44, THEMA Working Papers from THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise

Abstract: We present the results of an experiment measuring social preferences within couples in a context where intra-household pay-off inequality can be reduced at the cost of diminishing household income. We measure social norms regarding this efficiency-equality trade-off and implement a cross-country comparison between France and Germany. In particular, we show that German households are more inequality averse and are thus less efficient than French households. A decomposition of this difference reveals that approximately 40% is driven by diverging sample compositions in the two countries, while 60% of the initial French/German difference remains unexplained. Beliefs differ significantly from observed behavior in both countries. Efficient choices are overestimated in the German sample and underestimated in the French.

Keywords: Intra-household allocation; Inequality aversion; Pareto efficiency; social norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C91 C92 D13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Equality-efficiency Trade-off within French and German Couples – A Comparative Experimental Study (2015)
Working Paper: Equality-Efficiency Trade-off within French and German Couples - A Comparative Experimental Study (2013)
Working Paper: Equality-Efficiency Trade-off within French and German Couples – A Comparative Experimental Study (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ema:worpap:2012-44

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