Opening the Black Box of Intrahousehold Decision Making: Theory and Nonparametric Empirical Tests of General Collective Consumption Models

We provide “revealed preference” tests of general collective consumption models that account for public consumption and externalities within the household. We further propose a novel approach to model special cases of this model, which imply alternative assumptions regarding the sharing rule. Our ap...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of political economy 2009-12, Vol.117 (6), p.1074-1104
Main Authors: Cherchye, Laurens, De Rock, Bram, Vermeulen, Frederic
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bargaining power
Consumer behavior
Consumption
Consumption patterns
Consumption theory
Datasets
Decision making
Economic models
Economic theory
Externalities
Household consumption
Households
Necessary conditions
Nonparametric models
Observed choices
Panel data
Political economy
Revealed preferences
Russian Federation
Studies
Sufficient conditions
Utility functions
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We provide “revealed preference” tests of general collective consumption models that account for public consumption and externalities within the household. We further propose a novel approach to model special cases of this model, which imply alternative assumptions regarding the sharing rule. Our application uses the panel data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. We find that the general model, together with a large class of special cases, cannot be rejected. By contrast, we do reject the standard unitary model. Since our tests are entirely nonparametric, this provides strong evidence in favor of models focusing on intrahousehold decision making.
ISSN:0022-3808
1537-534X
DOI:10.1086/649563