ABSTRACT
Despite the importance of intrahousehold decision-making, economists have not always done well to understand what happens within the boundaries of the home. This is because mainstream economists have focused on the market economy, often ignoring the unpaid work done within the home. Economic models of intrahousehold resource allocation have extended beyond initial challenges to the unitary model of the household, demonstrating that many households do not obtain cooperative or efficient outcomes, at least in strictly economic terms. Models of household decision-making and resource allocation are silent on the processes. They consider how proxies for bargaining power affect the outcomes, but were not designed to tell us about the processes of how these decisions and allocations were reached. The advances in the intrahousehold allocation and decision-making literature have frequently occurred due to the relationships between the theory and the empirical work. Feminist theory and realities on the ground challenged early empirical work that treated households as though they were individuals.
