Inefficient Collective Households: Cooperation and Consumption

Abstract

Abstract We propose a model of consumption inefficiency in collective households. Inefficiency depends on a ‘cooperation factor’, which can also affect both the allocation of resources within a household and the utility of household members. Households are conditionally efficient, conditioning on the value of the cooperation factor. This lets us exploit convenient modelling features of efficient households (like not needing to specify the bargaining process), while still accounting for, and measuring the dollar cost of, inefficient levels of cooperation.