Gender, information and the efficiency of household production decisions: An experiment in rural Togo

Marie Apedo-Amah, Habiba Djebbari and Roberta Ziparo
Additional contact information
Marie Apedo-Amah: Stanford University

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We test the existence of cheap talk between husbands and wives working together in a family business. Our setting is the farm household. We designed an experiment, contextualized as an input allocation game, in which the husband chooses the amount of resources to invest on his own plot and on his wife's land. The return from the land managed by the wife is higher. We experimentally vary whether the returns from the wife's plot are communicated to the husband (i) by the experimenter, (ii) by the wife herself, and (iii) by the wife herself but with the possibility for the husband to verify the accuracy of the information from the experimenter after he makes his allocation decision. Male producers allocate too few inputs to their wife's plot across all experimental conditions. We rationalize these ndings in a setting with limited enforcement of marital agreements and derive additional predictions. First, allocative ineciencies in production are worse when women hold private information compared to the full information treatment. This eect is stronger for households for which resource-sharing under full information is lower. Second, communication between spouses can only compensate for damages from private information when the information is veriable ex post.

Keywords: household production and intra-household allocation; non-cooperative game theory; asymmetric and private information; lab-in-the-field experiment; farm households (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-exp
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02462673v3
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02462673v3/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender, Information and the Efficiency of Household Production Decisions: An Experiment in Rural Togo (2020)
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:wpaper:halshs-02462673

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().