The Evolution of Household Bargaining

This chapter first presents an explicitly evolutionary model of the emergence of coordination in modern households. The chapter shows why certain conditions might favor market labor for one gender and home labor for the other. The goal is to provide a proof of concept for the usefulness of evolutionary models in this domain, as opposed to traditional game theoretic models. The chapter also argues that once these patterns have emerged, they should be relatively stable in the face of changing social conditions. Using these patterns of coordination as a starting point, the chapter then shows why emerging patterns of household bargaining, i.e., over who does more total work, and has more total leisure time, should favor whichever gender tends to be employed in market work.