Intra-household bargaining for a joint vacation

Taking a holiday trip is a common couple-based leisure activity in which both partners tend to be actively involved. This paper studies the intra-household bargaining for the choice of a vacation destination within couples. We conduct a discrete choice experiment in which we elicit both individual and couple preferences for different hypothetical travel portfolios in a two-stage experimental design. The couple choices are modelled as a function of males' and females' individual preferences, allowing for different bargaining weights for each characteristic of the holiday trip. Therefore, we assess partners’ bargaining power (influence) in the couple choices conditional on individual preferences. We find that although males have a more influential role overall, there seems to be a gender specialization in that females decide on the type of accommodation and males focus on the trip cost.