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This chapter challenges one of the main tenets of agricultural economics—that households behave as though they are single individuals, with production factors allocated efficiently between men and women. In many contexts this is a convenient and innocuous assumption. It can be quite restrictive, however, when investigating the causes and welfare consequences of gender differences in agriculture. In response to a growing number of econometric studies that have found strong evidence against the hypothesis that households act as if they are individuals, researchers have proposed a number of different models of the interaction that occurs between individuals within the household. Many of these models share with the standard model the assumption that the allocation of resources is Pareto efficient. These models make a variety of alternative assumptions, however, concerning the sharing rule within the household and the threat points used as fallback positions by the individuals in the household in the event that a cooperative equilibrium is not achieved.
