Don't tell on me: Experimental evidence of asymmetric information in transnational households

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ambler, Kate
• 署名单位: CGIAR; International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3878
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2014.11.001
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 52-69
• 关键词: remittances; Intra-household allocation; information asymmetries; Transnational households

摘要

Although most theoretical models of household decision making assume perfect information, empirical studies suggest that information asymmetries can have large impacts on resource allocation. I demonstrate the importance of these asymmetries in transnational households, where physical distance between family members can make information barriers especially acute. I implement an experiment among migrants in Washington, DC, and their families in El Salvador that examines how information asymmetries can have strategic and inadvertent impacts on remittance decisions. Migrants make an incentivized decision over how much of a cash windfall to remit, and recipients decide how they will spend a remittance. Migrants strategically send home less when their choice is not revealed to recipients. Recipients make spending choices closer to migrants' preferences when the migrants' preferences are shared, regardless of whether or not the spending choices are revealed to the migrants, suggesting that recipients' choices are inadvertently affected by imperfect information. (C) 2014 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).