DO SPOUSES COOPERATE? AND IF NOT: WHY?

In this paper we present results from an economic experiment with 100 co-habiting couples, to investigate behavior in a prisoner’s dilemma played by spouses. We observe that a significant amount of spouses choose not to cooperate. To understand why spouses might prefer defection, we use a novel allocation task to elicit the individual's trade-off between efficiency and equality in the couple. We further investigate the impact of socio-demographic and psychological characteristics of the couples. We find in particular that lack of preferences for joint income maximization, having children and being married lead to higher defection rates in the social dilemma