Do spouses realise cooperative gains? Experimental evidence from rural Uganda

Vegard Iversen, Cecile Jackson, Bereket Kebede, Alistair Munro and Arjan Verschoor
Additional contact information
Vegard Iversen: University of Manchester
Cecile Jackson: University of East Anglia
Arjan Verschoor: University of East Anglia

No 10-02, Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) from School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.

Abstract: Intra-household efficiency is tested by using experimental data from variants of a public good game from 240 couples in rural Uganda. Spouses frequently do not maximise surplus from cooperation and realise a greater surplus when women are in charge of allocating the common pool. Women contribute less than men. These results cast doubts on many models of household decision making including unitary and collective models and on Sen's (1990) conjecture of greater female identification with household interests. We also find strong evidence for opportunism, where spouses don't contribute to the common pool even when they are in control of its allocation. Experimental results are correlated with some socio-economic conditions in a manner suggesting that assortative matching improves household efficiency. The development of non-cooperative intra-household models that allow in their empirical implementation for sensitivity to the context-specificity of gender relations seems to be a promising direction for future research.

Keywords: household behaviour; cooperation; gender; experiments; Africa; Uganda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 D10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ueaeco.github.io/working-papers/papers/cbess/UEA-CBESS-10-02.pdf main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Spouses Realise Cooperative Gains? Experimental Evidence from Rural Uganda (2011)
Working Paper: What’s love got to do with it ? An experimental test of household models in East Uganda (2006)
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:uea:wcbess:10-02

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Reception, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK
eco.reception@uea.ac.uk

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) from School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cara Liggins (eco.reception@uea.ac.uk).