Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Does Mother Nature Punish Rotten Kids?, Ted Bergstrom, Carl Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

The theory of parent-offspring conflict predicts that mothers and their offspring may not agree about how resources should be allocated among family members. A kid, for example, may favor a later weaning date than does its mother. Despite the mother's physical superiority, it may be that the kid is able to manipulate her behavior. In this paper, we investigate a two-locus population genetic model of weaning conflict in which offspring can attempt to extort resources from their parents by reducing their own chances of survival if their demands are not met. We find that the frequency of recombination between the …

Economics In A Family Way, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper is an advertisement for some facts and ideas that I think likely to lead to a richer theory of the economics of the family. The discussion references many papers from anthropology and biology. Because of the intimate connection between the family and reproduction, it should not be surprising that there is much to be learned about the economics of the family from the study of evolutionary biology. Given the increased prevalence in recent decades of unwed parenthood, divorce with sequential monogamy, and ``non-traditional'' family arrangements, it seems that anthropological studies of alternative family structures would help us to …

Income Prospects And Age At Marriage, Ted Bergstrom, Bob Schoeni

Ted C Bergstrom

In an earlier paper Courtship as a Waiting Game, Mark Bagnoli and I proposed a theory that explained why it is the case that in almost every society and at almost all recorded times, the average age at marriage of men exceeds that of women. An additional prediction of this model was that men who married later in life would turn out to have higher incomes when they reach maturity than those who marry young. The current paper reviews this theory and tests it with U.S. data. Consistent with our theory, we find that there is a strong positive relationship …

Courtship As A Waiting Game, Ted Bergstrom, Mark Bagnoli

Ted C Bergstrom

In most times and places, women on average, marry older men. We suggest a partial explanation. If the economic roles of males are more specialized than those of females, the desirability of a female as a mate may become evident at an earlier age than is the case for males. Males with good prospects will wait until their economic success is revealed before choosing a bride. Those with poor prospects try to marry young. In equilibrium, the most desirable young females choose successful older males. The less desirable young females have no better option than to marry available young males.

A Fresh Look At The Rotten Kid Theorem, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

Gary Becker's ``Rotten Kid Theorem'' asserts that if all family members receive gifts of money income from a benevolent household member, then even if the household head does not precommit to an incentive plan for family members, it will be in the interest of selfish family members to maximize total family income. We show by examples that the Rotten Kid theorem is not true without assuming transferable utility. We find a simple condition on utility functions that is necessary and sufficient for there to be the kind of transferable utility needed for a Rotten Kid Theorem. While restrictive, these conditions …

The Effects Of Cohort Size On Marriage Markets In Twentieth Century Sweden, Ted Bergstrom, David Lam

Ted C Bergstrom

Large, short-run fluctuations in the birth rate have been an important demographic feature of industrialized, low-fertility populations in the twentieth century. Since females normally marry men who are two or three years older than themselves, these fluctuations result in large imbalances between the size of male and female cohorts who would normally marry each other. These imbalances must somehow be resolved, either by a change in traditional patterns of age at marriage or by changes in the proportions of the population of one sex or the other who ever marry.

Following a suggestion of Becker (1974,1981), we have developed a …

Love And Spaghetti, The Opportunity Cost Of Virtue, Ted Bergstrom

Ted C Bergstrom

This paper was written in the form of two puzzles. One puzzle concerns Romeo and Juliet who love spaghetti and each other. They wear flimsy clothing and have abdominal hedonimeters. The other puzzle asks who benefits from tax deductions to the rich for charitable deductions.

Recovering Event Histories By Cubic Spline Interpolation, Ted Bergstrom, David Lam

Ted C Bergstrom

If event histories are recorded in discrete intervals of times, errors are introduced when the data are converted from the unit in which they were recorded, such as date, to another unit such as age or duration. The problem is illustrated by the inconsistent age at marriage schedules published by two recent U.S. censuses. This paper develops a general method for fixing problems of this kind by using cubic spline interpolation. We use the method to adjust U.S. age at marriage data, thus resolving a large proportion of the discrepancy between 1960 and 1970 censuses.

Can Courtship Be Cheatproof?, Ted Bergstrom, Richard Manning

Ted C Bergstrom

In 1983, I told Richard Manning about Gale and Shapley's beautiful 1962 paper on matching. He asked whether in the Gale-Shapley it was in the interest of all participants to tell the truth. We rather quickly showed that in general it is not in the interest of the recipients of offers to be truthful. In fact we were able to show that no mechanism can guarantee efficient assignments and be cheatproof. We were very pleased. We sent it to a journal, only to learn that Al Roth had beat us to it in a paper that was to appear in …