Gender-Based Wage Differences, Household Bargaining and Working Women’s Welfare: Theory and Evidence From Izmir, Turkey

This paper looks at household welfare distribution among two-income couples from three social strata in Izmir, Turkey. A simple explicit two-stage dynamic game theory model is developed to determine if an egalitarian intra-household distribution under certain circumstances is consistent  even though women earn lower wages than men. The data was derived from a questionnaire developed to determine the viewpoints of each spouse regarding the personal expenditures of the other.  The model, although a noncooperative household bargaining model, also has aspects of cooperative models and proved to be flexible enough to be applicable for different socio-economic strata