Strategic Interaction in Daughter-Son Care for an Elderly Parent

We represent the daughter-son interaction in providing care for an elderly parent as: (1) a coordination game or (2) a fair division problem.These formulations allow exploration of the possibilities for reshaping the social convention of assigning the primary responsibility for care to the daughter and provide ways to make economics relevant to the concerns of female students.The exploration introduces students to strategic moves (threats), issues of credibility, the value of cultivating a reputation before the challenge of providing care arises, and the relative merits of alternative fair division methods.The set-up costs for game theory teachers are modest.Stevens, Zeager / Journal of Economics Teaching ( 2025) "For most of the nation's history, caring for the elderly was a family affair carried out largely by women in the home.As the twenty-first century unfolds, however, elder care in the United States is an increasingly complex enterprise " Bookman and Kimbrel (2011)