Intra‐Household Experiments: A Survey

Abstract

Experiments with family groups are rare, but since many decisions are taken at the household level or occur within the household it is an important area to investigate. This paper provides a survey of the recent experimental work on intra‐household decision‐making. I discuss some of the challenges involved in doing experiments with couples and families and consider major areas that remain yet to be explored. While general themes from the research are still emerging, four results repeatedly occur: (1) the absence of efficiency in intra‐household decisions; (2) joint decisions that are not a convex combination of individual decisions; (3) individual behaviour is affected by opportunities for hiding actions from spouses and (4) deviations from standard models of microeconomics in line with those seen in the anomalies literature of individual decision‐making.

Keywords: Couples, Experiment, Family, Household