The Good Wife? Reputation Dynamics and Financial Decision-Making inside the Household
研究妻子为维持丈夫眼中的好声誉而避免风险购买并过度使用低回报商品的行为，通过马拉维农村夫妻实验提供证据。
We study reputation dynamics within the household in a setting where women regularly receive transfers from their husbands for household purchases. We propose a signaling model in which wives try to maintain a good reputation in the eyes of their husbands to receive high transfers. This leads them to (i) avoid risky purchases (goods with unknown returns) and (ii) knowingly overuse low-return goods to hide bad purchase decisions—we call this the intrahousehold sunk cost effect. We present supportive evidence for the model from a series of experiments with married couples in rural Malawi.