Making spouses cooperate in rural Ugandan households Experimental evidence of distributional treatment effects

This study investigates the impact of participatory household decision-making, introduced through a randomly encouraged intensive coaching package and less intensive couple seminars, in agricultural households in Uganda on intrahousehold cooperation and sharing behaviour measured in a lab-in-the-field experiment. The effects on the likelihood of playing the most cooperative strategies in two sequential voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) games and on average fractions contributed by couples, husbands and wives are limited and not clear-cut. Allowing a selection of couples to communicate before the second VCM game did not reinforce treatment effects even if they mimicked the treatment. The same applies for the impact on sharing behaviour in dictator games simultaneously played by husband and wife, following either the second VCM game with or without communication. There are however distributional treatment effects. The coaching made husbands and wives who are already cooperative more cooperative in the second VCM game and more generous in the sharing game specifically when communication is allowed. The couple seminars had similar effects among husbands. At the lower end of the distribution, the coaching and couple seminars negatively affected husbands and wives contributed shares in the second VCM game with communication; and wives offers in the subsequent sharing game. Acknowledgement : This project has received funding from the European Union s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 702964. The project received funding from the Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung and from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Uganda research station, as well. We would like to thank Dr. Ben D'Exelle, Dr. Arjan Verschoor and Dr. Bereket Kebede for valuable advice for the design of the lab-in-the-field experiments.