Experimental Design
We will recruit married couples in Kolkata, India. Each couple plays an experimental game in which their primary objective is to guess the number of red balls in an urn containing 20 balls, each of which is either red or white. Individuals are told that the number of red balls in the urn can between 4 and 16, thus the distribution is known.
Each spouse individually draws a set of balls to learn about the contents of the urn and then makes their first guess. Before making their second guess they are again able to learn about the contents of the urn. The source of this second signal varies across two between subject treatments as follows:
Individual Treatment: In this treatment, each spouse again draws some balls (with replacement) a second time privately.
Discussion Treatment: In this treatment, individuals discuss with their spouses, for however long they want. Thus, the source of a second signal will be one’s spouse, instead of a second set of draws. Comparing the weight one puts on information that they have gathered themselves or learn from their spouse, will allow me to test whether the information flow from wives to husbands is indeed worse than the information flow from husbands to wives. Additionally I can then test whether the underweighting or overweighting your spouse's information is related to actual or perceived relative ability difefrences.
To examine the consequences of asymmetric learning on decision-making power, after the second guess, individuals are presented with a surprise opportunity to choose a decision-maker (DM). Each participant is told that a DM is one whose second guess will be counted for additional payment for the couple. The treatment variation before second guess allows me to explore if individuals can account for asymmetric learning when deciding how to allocate decision-making power, i.e., does the failure of perfect information agregation also translate to how couples decides who makes decisions based off of the same information.
In the second part of the experiment, after participants finish the ball task, they are shown two baskets of goods- male type and female type. The spouses privately guess the prices for each basket type. This first private guess is without any consultation with their spouses. Performace or ability o this guess would establish the comparative advantage. After a discussion with one's spouse, they again privately guess the prices for each basket. I am again interested in how much weight you put on your spouse's information when its the gender incongrunt domain and additionally how one adjusts their guesses after a discussion. With this price task, the existing expertise gives rise to well defined beliefs about ability, which guides who you should listen to as you can actually learn something useful from that person. Thus I will also collect beliefs for the different product types, to test that one was indeed aware of the comparative adavantge.