Document de travail

Equality-Efficiency Trade-off within French and German Couples – A Comparative Experimental Study

Miriam Beblo, Denis Beninger, François Cochard, Hélène Couprie et Astrid Hopfensitz

Résumé

We present the results of an experiment measuring social preferences within couples in a context where intra-household pay-off inequality can be reduced at the cost of diminishing household income. We measure social norms regarding this efficiency-equality trade-off and implement a cross-country comparison between France and Germany. In particular, we show that German households are more inequality averse and are thus less efficient than French households. A decomposition of this difference reveals that approximately 40% is driven by diverging sample compositions in the two countries, while 60% of the initial French/German difference remains unexplained. Beliefs differ significantly from observed behavior in both countries. Efficient choices are overestimated in the German sample and underestimated in the French.

Mots-clés

Intra-household allocation; Inequality aversion; Pareto efficiency; social norms;

Codes JEL

  • C71: Cooperative Games
  • C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior
  • C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior
  • D13: Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation

Remplacé par

Miriam Beblo, Denis Beninger, François Cochard, Hélène Couprie et Astrid Hopfensitz, « Efficiency-Equality Trade-off within French and German Couples – A Comparative Experimental Study », Annales d'Économie et de Statistique, Paris, n° 117-118, juin 2015, p. 233–252.

Référence

Miriam Beblo, Denis Beninger, François Cochard, Hélène Couprie et Astrid Hopfensitz, « Equality-Efficiency Trade-off within French and German Couples – A Comparative Experimental Study », TSE Working Paper, n° 12-374, novembre 2012.

Voir aussi

Publié dans

TSE Working Paper, n° 12-374, novembre 2012