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A portmanteau experiment on the relevance of individual decision anomalies for households

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Alistair Munro  and
Danail Popov
Alistair Munro*
Affiliation:
National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, 106-8677, Japan
Danail Popov
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Although households are responsible for many important decisions, they have rarely been the subject of economics experiments. We conduct a series of linked and incentivized experiments on decision-making, designed to see if the anomalies typically found in individual choice experiments are found when the subjects are couples from long-term relationships. Specifically we investigate the endowment effect, the compromise effect, asymmetric dominance and the ‘more is less’ phenomena. Comparing the results with two control groups (students and non-student individuals) we find broadly the same pattern of anomalies in individuals as we do in couples. Thus behavioural patterns that appear in individual choices appear relevant for decisions made by established couples.

Keywords

Household choiceExperimentCouplesFamilyAnomaliesEndowment effectCompromise effectAsymmetric dominance‘More is less’

JEL classification

D80: General
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 335 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-012-9340-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The work reported here was financed by the UK’s ESRC, grant no. RES-000-22-2081.

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Supplementary material: File

Munro and Popov supplementary material

Supplementary material. Questions from the experiments (from the version given to couples – for individuals ‘we’ becomes ‘I’).
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