Abstract
In this paper, I experimentally investigate couples’ specialization decisions and examine the gender-specific patterns in labor division arising within heterosexual couples. Eighty participants—20 real couples and 20 pairs of strangers—play a two-stage game, paired up either with their partner or a stranger of the opposite sex. In the first stage, participants make a joint decision on how to play the game: They can both complete a performance-based paid task (task A) or have one of the players perform an unpaid task (task B), thereby tripling the pay-rate for the partner playing task A. After completing their tasks, participants are informed about their pay-offs in private and then asked to make an individual decision about what proportion of their income to pay into a common pool, where it is increased by 20 % and distributed equally between the two players. I find that women are significantly more likely to give up their income autonomy and perform the unpaid task when playing with their partner rather than with an unfamiliar man. Men’s behavior is not affected by familiarity with their female partner.
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Notes
Assuming, of course, that a withdrawal of either of them is still beneficial for the overall household welfare—i.e., purchasing household services externally imposes higher costs than one partner’s (partial) labor market absence.
Schröder and Schmitt (2014) investigate the effects of individual versus joint taxation on couples’ labor supply, modelled as individual work effort. Cochard et al. (2013) explore how couples distribute resources when the initial allocation is determined exogenously versus endogenously (i.e. resulting from their individual work-effort). Beblo and Beninger (2010) document the attempt to investigate partners’ provision of unpaid work vs. enjoying leisure-time experimentally.
This classification is not unambiguous, though. Grossbard (2011) argues that Becker’s (1965) model does not rely on the assumption that the household maximizes a unitary (benevolent altruist’s) utility function and may instead be regarded as an independent individual’s utility maximization within a household, where partner income enters the constraints. While Becker (1965) himself is not explicit on the interpretation, Gronau (1973), in his article advancing the Beckerian model, states his interpretation in the introduction: “This new theory has revived interest in the family as the basic consumption unit.”
Strictly speaking, a productivity (dis-)advantage in labor market activities is not a necessary requirement. Becker himself claims a biologically determined comparative advantage for women in household-related work, particularly in child-rearing see (Becker 1991).
For example, very prominently demonstrated by Kahneman and Tversky (1979).
For example, Peters et al. (2004) conduct experiments to investigate the behavior of families in public good games. They ask participants to decide how much of their private endowment or pay-off they invest into a common pool; the amount collected is then multiplied by some factor >1 and re-distributed in equal shares among all players, regardless of their initial contribution. The authors find that family members contribute higher shares (and hence generate higher overall pay-offs) when playing among themselves only, as opposed to playing in mixed groups with strangers. Cochard et al. (2009) demonstrate that, in symmetrical prisoner’s dilemma games, 73 % of participants cooperate when playing with their partners, as opposed to only 43 % of those playing with a stranger of the opposite sex.
Participants had to type their partner’s answers for task A from a paper-pencil answer sheet into a spreadsheet on a computer. The exact nature of either task is unknown to the participants. They were made aware that both tasks involve real effort and that their completion is mandatory in order to generate a pay-off.
See the working paper version of this paper, Görges (2014), for the complete experimental instructions participants received.
Since the quiz was introduced as containing a wide variety of different questions, it can be claimed to be a rather gender-neutral task, as even subjects concerned with stereo-typical beliefs may have expected questions that are “typically easy for men but not for women” and those of the opposite type to be just as likely to occur.
Whether pay-offs are public or private has been shown to have different effects in varying experimental settings with couples: In a field experiment conducted by Ashraf (2009) in the Philippines, men were more likely to store pay-offs in their personal accounts when they solely were informed about them in private. However, once an individual’s pay-off was public information to both spouses, men were more likely than women to commit to pooled consumption. In a lab experiment conducted by Cochard et al. (2009), participants were asked to allocate tokens among themselves, with each partner having an individual exchange-rate that was private information. The authors found a clear majority of partners revealing their private exchange rate in the bargaining task and hence trying to realize efficient outcomes instead of using the chance to behave opportunistically.
It is obvious, however, that a disadvantage may still arise if players do not invest equal shares or if one partner performed worse in the quiz and therefore simply has less money at his disposal to invest.
Participants were asked to state their partners’ birthday, which one is much less likely to know by heart if one is not involved in a romantic relationship with that person.
May not add up to 100 because of rounding.
Couples in the treatment group and unfamiliar individuals for the control group were recruited via separate advertisements.
The exact statistics: M=25.10, SD=4.49. The fact that the sample consists of 92 % university students who were largely in their mid-twenties should necessarily be born in mind when deriving conclusions. See Sect. 6 for a more thorough discussion.
Compared to the standard game-theoretic predictions, this might actually be viewed as a surprisingly high rate of cooperation among strangers. This can be viewed as a form of a trust game, where even completely anonymous players have been recorded consistently to cooperate by “trusting” (Berg et al. 1995; Fehr and Gächter 2000; Oosterbeek et al. 2003). The fact that most participants shared a common identity as students could have driven up the cooperation rate. Furthermore, even though participants were assured that their income and their investment decision would be kept secret from their partner, it was obvious that at least to the experimenter, they were known instantly—which might have also favored the high investment rate and the small rate of opportunism in the unfamiliar condition.
\(\chi ^{2}(1)=10, p=.001.\)
Among co-operators in both groups, however, two task-A-players (roughly 10 % of familiar and 17 % of unfamiliar co-operators) did not fulfil their part of the deal to the full extent and exceeded opportunism: i.e., those “defectors” invested only a share of their stage 1 earnings. Although this type of opportunistic behavior approaches the homo-economicus behavioral predictions, none of them let their partners down completely. The minimum invested was 49 % of the amount earned in task A among familiar couples and 60 % among unfamiliar cooperators.
80 % of them actually managed to coordinate, i.e. both partners mutually invested all their income.
Another possible explanation, which is rather speculative at this stage of research, involves male ostentation: in particular, males might feel the desire to impress their female partner by signaling they performed well in the task rather than potentially being suspected to not have generated much money to invest into the pool in the first place due to poor performance on the quiz.
Fisher-exact-test: \(\chi ^{2}\)(1)=8.12, p=.004.
The exact test-statistic for familiar females is \(\chi ^{2}(1)=3.2,\, p=.037\) against the one-sided alternative that the probability of performing the unpaid task is >0.5. For unfamiliar females, testing against the same one-sided alternative delivers \(\chi ^{2}(1)=.077,\, p=.609.\)
For an evaluation of participants’ actual performance by groups, please refer to the robustness checks provided in Sect. 6.
As noted earlier, there were two exceptions both among familiar and unfamiliar co-operators, where a task-A performer was assisted by his partner (i.e., a task-B performer) and did not invest the entire sum earned.
The results of four participants had to be excluded for calculating the means. They admitted (and their answer sheets also proved this) to have “cheated”, all of them in the same way: They knew it was impossible to solve all questions within the given time interval of ten minutes (this was public information), so they reserved the last minute of their “work time” to randomly guess the multiple-choice answers to those questions they had not yet answered. This was not explicitly prohibited, so strictly speaking they were not cheating. However, by doing so they were able to solve presumably roughly as many questions as other participants plus the extra share scored correctly by chance (wrong answers did not affect income; this was public information, too). I am able to identify the participants in question (because, during the debriefing, they admitted to have applied this strategy) and I can also be sure that this was not the case for any other participant (as their answer sheet would have revealed such a strategy even if they had not told me). However, I cannot identify exactly how many questions “cheaters” were able to “honestly” solve and how many they simply guessed correctly. Therefore, I am unable to correct their score, which is why I decided to exclude them completely from the analysis of the participants’ performance. Three of these cases (all male task-A players) occurred in the familiar group, and one (a male task-B player who “added” guessed answers to his partner’s multiple-choice-answers when copying them into the spreadsheet) in the unfamiliar group.
\(W=1666.5,\, p=.05\). Moreover, it is important to note that, among cooperating task-A players, performance does not differ significantly by gender.
I have conducted further tests: Recalling the descriptive statistics provided on participants in 4.4 one could suspect that the higher share of PhD students in the familiar group might pose a problem in terms of productivity differences. However, testing the mean scores of PhD students against other participants’ also confirms no significant differences in average performance.
\(W=1183.97;\, p<.001\)
Again, I have conducted further tests to confirm that there is no significant interaction effect between gender and familiarity that could explain the difference in the behavior between unfamiliar and familiar women.
In particular, it equals the sum of scores assigned to five different statements [(items (k)–(o) in the questionnaire, see Görges 2014].
The index sums up the scores for items (g)–(j) in the questionnaire.
Items (p) and (q) in the questionnaire, see Görges (2014).
Items (r) and (s).
Precisely, half of all familiar couples reported a time-span of 19 months or less when asked for the duration of their relationship.
This is even more so the case, when individuals do not have access to complete information and potential outcomes of a decision are not entirely foreseeable. In the real world, the costs of deviating from social norms, and thus the benefits of complying, may weigh in immediately, whereas the costs for conform behavior (in this case, women giving up financial autonomy when a man acts as provider) often occur in the future; employability decreases with each year spent outside the labor market, and labor market absence is associated with less accumulated savings and social insurance entitlements and, consequently, a higher risk for poverty.
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Acknowledgments
I conducted the experiment with financial research support provided by the University of Warwick. I am grateful for valuable advice and comments from Miriam Beblo, Denis Beninger, Bart Golsteyn, Shoshana Grossbard, Daniel Hamermesh, Martin Heidenreich, Thomas Hills, Ulf Kadritzke, Peter Kuhn, Andreas Lange, Marcus Nöth, Annemarie Paul, Arne Pieters, Helmut Rainer, Thomas Siedler, the participants of a workshop on experimental economics and a seminar on family economics at the Universitaet Hamburg, as well as from two anonymous referees. All remaining errors are my own.
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Görges, L. The power of love: A subtle driving force for unegalitarian labor division?. Rev Econ Household 13, 163–192 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-014-9273-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-014-9273-6