Although new agricultural technologies are widely expected to enhance the productivity of rural
households, evidence on how households reallocate resources to capitalize on these innovations is
limited. To explore how households respond to a profitable, but risky new technology, I conduct
a framed field experiment played with maize growing couples that simulates the exchange of labor
and income in Mozambican households. When presented with a familiar local maize variety that
is relatively insensitive to the wife’s labor input, households allocate labor to husbands’ maize
production fairly efficiently. But when faced with an improved maize variety whose higher returns
would induce cooperative households to increase maize labor, couples forego 17% of expected
cooperative income. Analysis of husbands’ income sharing rules reveals that wives would have
received just 23% of the productivity gains that would have accrued to households, had they
allocated their labor so as to fully exploit the New technology, and would have borne 2.4 times the
downside risk faced by husbands. These results suggest that stickiness in intra-household income
sharing may dampen the reallocation of productive resources in households that adopt profitable
new technologies. Novel empirical evidence on real life intra-household income sharing from sample
communities corroborates key findings from the game.
