Intrafamily Bargaining and Household Decisions

Abstract

A model of household decisions based on a bargaining approach is developed, providing a comprehensive framework for the analysis of family behavior. Treating the family as an economic organization, household behavior is explained by the cooperation of utility maximizing individuals. The difference from traditional microeconomic household models is that the assumption of a joint household utility function is abandoned. Instead of this, a game theoretic approach is used to model family decisions as a result of intrafamily bargaining. Inhalt 1 Introduction 2 Models of the 'new home economics' 3 Family decisions as a bargaining problem 4 A Nash bargaining model for household decisions 5 Time allocation in a static bargaining model with household production 6 A dynamic model with accumulation of human capital 7 Pareto efficiency of family decisions 8 The binding force of intrafamily contracts 9 Introducing uncertainty: the possibility oc conflict 10 Empirical tests of the bargaining approach 11 Survey of empirical bargaining models 12 Empirical evidence of the bargaining approach - first findings with German data 13 Concluding remarks Appendix Bibliography Index