Enlarging the collective model of household behavior: a revealed preference analysis

We use a comprehensive model of strategic household behavior in which the spouses’ expenditure on each public good is decomposed into autonomous spending and coordinated spending à la Lindahl. We obtain a continuum of semi-cooperative regimes parameterized by the relative weights put on autonomous spending, by each spouse and for each public good, nesting full cooperative and noncooperative regimes as limit cases. Testing is approached through revealed preference analysis, by looking for rationalizability of observed data sets, with the price of each public good lying between the maximum and the sum of the hypothesized marginal willingness to pay of the two spouses. Once rationalized, an observed data set always allows to identify the sharing rule, except when both spouses contribute in full autonomy to some public good (a situation of local income pooling).