Intra-family bargaining and time allocation

"This paper investigates a new empirical implication of the cooperative bargaining model of family decision-making: the effect of threat point variations on time allocation decisions of the husband and wife....The bargaining model examined in this paper utilizes the cooperative game theory approach which assumes, among other things, that both players (spouses) know each other's utility function. With many family decisions such as marital dissolution, timing and spacing of children, labor market entry or reentry for the wife, it is not necessarily true that the preferences of each spouse are accurately known by the other.... In the context of the two-period model sketched out in this paper, bargaining between husband and wife over the extent of human capital investment for the wife, and the time allocation tradeoffs necessary to attain such an investment might be fruitfully modelled in a noncooperative framework." Data are from a variety of sources, including a University of Michigan study of couples' time-allocation patterns in 37 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.