School Brown Bag: Uzma Afzal

Cooperation between spouses: Evidence from a series of field experiments in Pakistan

Abstract:  We investigate systematic heterogeneity in cooperative decision-making across spouses in arranged and love matched marriages in Pakistan, where the former is the traditional practice and the latter is associated with modernization. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that unconditional cooperation is more prevalent between spouses within love matched marriages. We engaged married couples living in villages between 20 and 38 km from the city of Faisalabad in a variant of a one-shot, two-person, sequential public goods game, in which we applied the strategy method to the second mover. Then, we applied hierarchical clustering analysis to the strategy data in order to categorize spouses into cooperative types. We find that spouses in love matched marriages are significantly more likely to be unconditionally cooperative. In the second series of experiments, we investigate (1) whether this finding replicates, (2) whether it generalizes to couples living in more remote villages and (3) whether the observed difference in unconditional cooperativeness between spouses in love matched versus arranged marriages can be explained by the selection of unconditionally cooperative people into the former. As in the previous experiments, we find that in villages close to the city love matched spouses are significantly more likely to be unconditionally cooperative. However, as distance from the city increases, the love matched effect declines. We conjecture that this is owing to less tolerance for love matched marriages in more remote areas. The behaviour of husbands and wives in a corresponding series of inter-household games establishes that greater unconditional cooperation between spouses in love matched marriages close to the city cannot be attributed to a selection effect. Finally, to investigate our conjecture, in a third round of experiments we look at whether a social norm prescribing arranged marriage exists and whether the strength of that norm varies systematically depending on remoteness. We find that there is indeed an arranged marriage social norm and that this norm is stronger in villages that are more remote and less exposed to modernity.