Individual time preferences of married couples in a fisheries society

Overexploitation of marine resources in Indonesia is threatening their sustainability and is considered to be induced by shortsightedness of fishermen and/or of their wives at household level. Given this states of affairs, we address individual time preferences of married couples (fishermen and their wives) in fisheries. To this end, we conduct an individual discounting elicitation experiment with 200 married couples (200 fishermen and 200 fishermen’s wives) in an Indonesian fisheries society, Karawang regency. We find that fishermen’s discount factors are slightly higher than their wives’ ones on an average with positive correlation between the two, and their incomes have idiosyncratic influences on individual time preferences of a couple. Fishermen’s incomes weakly influence only wives’ time preferences, while wives’ incomes significantly and positively affect not only fishermen’s but also wives’ time preferences to be farsighted. The betafit regression demonstrates that a wife’s (fisherman’s) discount factor increases by 5.1% (5.6 %) when a wife’s income increases by 1 million Rp. This result suggests that economic empowerment of fishermen’s wives is key for sustainability of marine resources and societies in Indonesia.