An experimental investigation of intra-household resource allocation in rural India

Hansika Kapoor, Savita Kulkarni and Anirudh Tagat ()

Artefactual Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: This study aims to investigate intra-household bargaining outcomes elicited in an artefactual field experiment design where participants completed a purchase task of real commodities. Married couples separately expressed their initial preferences over commodities. The bargaining process in the experiment was exogenously introduced by sharing information about partners' preferences in the treatment group. We hypothesized that the spouse with weaker bargaining position at the household level would consider the information of their partner's preferences while making own consumption decisions more compared to their partner. Therefore, they may deviate from their own preferences when purchasing commodities. More than 230 married couples from two villages in the Tamil Nadu state of India participated in the experiment. It was observed that information about partners' spending preferences resulted in reduced final allocation for female participants. However, the deviation was not significantly different from the original intention to spend. Therefore, information about partners' preferences may not be an effective medium to elicit bargaining power in the context of jointly-consumed household commodities. Subgroup analyses were performed to identify any heterogeneous treatment effects.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00640.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: An experimental investigation of intra-household resource allocation in rural India (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:feb:artefa:00640

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Artefactual Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().