Non-cooperative versus cooperative family

This paper focuses on strategic interaction within a family and examines individual decision making. We set up a two-stage game model. In the first stage of the game, a man and a woman who have not yet met simultaneously determine their education levels non-cooperatively. In the second stage, they marry and determine their leisure time. In the second stage, we compare two decision modes, non-cooperative and cooperative, in order to characterize the nature of cooperation within the families. In addition, we extend the basic model on the basis of a Stackelberg game. In this setting, we consider the case in which a man acts as a leader and a woman acts as a follower. We show that the leader invests in higher education and chooses more leisure time than the follower. This coincides with the empirical findings. Copyright Springer-Verlag Wien 2015