The Good Wife? Reputation Dynamics and Financial Decision-Making Inside the Household
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- We study the dynamic relationship between intra-household specialization, resource allocation and women’s investment decisions. We consider public good investments delegated to the wife in settings where wives perceived to be savvy investors by their husbands are entrusted with a larger share of the budget. We show, first theoretically, then empirically through a series of experiments with couples in Malawi, that a signaling game can result, in which wives, in order to maintain control over a larger share of the budget, (a) under-invest in novel goods with unknown returns; and (b) knowingly over-use low-return goods in order to hide bad purchase decisions—we call this the intra-household sunk cost fallacy. These dynamics matter for women’s well-being as well as for the design of poverty alleviation programs.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 12, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Buchmann, Nina |
|---|---|
| Author | Dupas, Pascaline |
| Organizer of meeting | Exley, Christine |
| Organizer of meeting | Marquina, Alejandro Martínez |
| Organizer of meeting | Niederle, Muriel |
| Organizer of meeting | Roth, Alvin |
| Organizer of meeting | Vesterlund, Lise |
Subjects
| Subject | intra-household model |
|---|---|
| Subject | signaling |
| Subject | dynamic games |
| Subject | experiment |
| Subject | technology |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Working paper |
| Genre | Grey literature |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Buchmann, N. and Dupas, P. (2022). The Good Wife? Reputation Dynamics and Financial Decision-Making Inside the Household. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/ff752cn7150
Collection
SITE Conference 2021
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