Do spouses cooperate? An experimental investigation

Hélène Couprie (), Francois Cochard () and Astrid Hopfensitz
Additional contact information
Francois Cochard: THEMA - Théorie économique, modélisation et applications - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - CY - CY Cergy Paris Université

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This study makes a significant contribution to investigations of household behavior by testing for a willingness to cooperate and share income by men and women who are either in couple with each other or complete strangers. We present results from an economic experiment conducted with 100 co-habiting heterosexual couples. We compare defection behavior in the prisoner's dilemma within real couples to pairs of strangers. One out of four participants chose not to cooperatewith their spouse. To understand why spouses might prefer defection, we use a novel allocation task to elicit the individual's trade-off between efficiency and equality within a couple. We further investigate the impact of socio-demographic and psychological characteristics of the couples. We find in particular that lack of preferences for joint income maximization, having children and being married lead to higher defection rates in the social dilemma.

Keywords: Prisoner dilemma; Experiment on couples; Household; Cooperation; Efficiency versus Equality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12-31
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published in Review of Economics of the Household, 2016, 1, pp.186-195. ⟨10.1007/s11150-014-9276-3⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Do spouses cooperate? An experimental investigation (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:hal:journl:hal-02980204

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-014-9276-3

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().