Household production function
Consumers often choose not directly from the commodities that they purchase but from commodities they transform into goods through a household production function. It is these goods that they value. The idea was originally proposed by Gary Becker, Kelvin Lancaster, and Richard Muth in the mid-1960s. The idea was introduced simultaneously into macroeconomics in two separate papers by Jess Benhabib, Richard Rogerson, and Randall Wright (1991); and Jeremy Greenwood and Zvi Hercowitz (1991). Household production theory has been used to explain the rise in married female labor-force participation over the course of the 20th century, as the result of labor-saving appliances. More recently with the rise of the DIY or Maker movement household production has become more sophisticated. For example, consumers can now convert plastic wire into high-value products with inexpensive 3-D printers in their own homes.
Example
A simple example of this is baking a cake. The consumer purchases flour, eggs, and sugar and then uses labor, know-how, time and other resources producing a cake. The consumer did not really want the flour, sugar, or eggs, but purchased them to produce the cake for consumption (instead of buying it, e.g., from a bakery).
See also
Further reading
- Becker, Gary S.; Ghez, Gilbert (1975). The Allocation of Time and Goods Over the Life Cycle. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-87014-514-8.
- Becker, Gary S. (1991) [1981]. A Treatise on the Family (Enlarged ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-90698-3. (HUP descr.)
- Becker, Gary S. (1987). "Family". The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. Vol. 2. pp. 281–86.
- Berk, Richard A. (1987). "Household production". The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. Vol. 2. New York: Stockton. pp. 673–75.
- Gronau, Reuben (1986). "Home Production: A Survey". Handbook of Labor Economics. Vol. 1. Elsevier. pp. 273–304. doi:10.1016/S1573-4463(86)01007-6. ISBN 9780444878564.
- Gronau, Reuben (1997). "The Theory of Home Production: The Past Ten Years". Journal of Labor Economics. 15 (2): 197–205. doi:10.1086/209830. JSTOR 2535387. S2CID 155060611.
- Gronau, Reuben (2008). "Household production and public goods". The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2nd ed.). Abstract.
- Pollak, Robert A.; Wachter, Michael L. (1975). "The Relevance of the Household Production Function and Its Implications for the Allocation of Time". Journal of Political Economy. 83 (2): 255–278. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.589.3887. doi:10.1086/260322. JSTOR 1830922. S2CID 32371565.
- Schultz, Theodore W., ed. (1974). Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, and Human Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-74085-0.