O'Neill, V and Hess, S (2014) Heterogeneity assumptions in the specification of bargaining models: a study of household level trade-offs between commuting time and salary. Transportation, 41 (4). 745 - 763. ISSN 0049-4488
Abstract
With many real world decisions being made in conjunction with other decision makers, or single agent decisions having an influence on other members of the decision maker's immediate entourage, there is strong interest in studying the relative weight assigned to different agents in such contexts. In the present paper, we focus on the case of one member of a two person household being asked to make choices affecting the travel time and salary of both members. We highlight the presence of significant heterogeneity across individuals not just in their underlying sensitivities, but also in the relative weight they assign to their partner, and show how this weight varies across attributes. This is in contrast to existing work which uses weights assigned to individual agents at the level of the overall utility rather than for individual attributes. We also show clear evidence of a risk of confounding between heterogeneity in marginal sensitivities and heterogeneity in the weights assigned to each member. We show how this can lead to misleading model results, and argue that this may also explain past results showing bargaining or weight parameters outside the usual [0,1] range in more traditional joint decision making contexts. In terms of substantive results, we find that male respondents place more weight on their partner's travel time, while female respondents place more weight on their partner's salary.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2013, Springer. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Transportation. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The final publication is available at link.springer.com. |
Keywords: | Household decisions; distributional assumptions; random coefficients; joint decisions; bargaining coefficient |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > Institute for Transport Studies (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 22 Nov 2013 12:47 |
Last Modified: | 23 Apr 2015 08:07 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11116-013-9483-4 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11116-013-9483-4 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:76915 |