Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Destination Marketing & Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jdmm Research Paper Is asking only one member of a couple sufficient to determine who influences tourism decisions? María-Mercedes Rojas-de-Gracia ∗ , Pilar Alarcón-Urbistondo, Ana-María Casado-Molina Department of Economics and Business Administration, University of Málaga, Faculty of Commerce and Management, Avda. Francisco Trujillo Villanueva, 1, 29071, Málaga, Spain ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Dyadic consensus Response agreement Perceived partner influence Family decision-making Vacations Couple roles ABSTRACT Research on consumer behavior has placed considerable importance on identifying which member of a couple makes purchase decisions. However, numerous studies have relied solely on the response of one member, as- suming that both are sufficiently in agreement, despite the lack of any clear support for this assumption of dyadic consensus. The aim of this study is to elucidate this question in tourism decisions, using a larger contemporary sample than those employed in other major studies. A further novelty of the study was to determine whether agreement could have been due to chance. Evidence was found of differences in the perception that each member of a couple had of the influence exerted. However, the degree of discrepancy between them depended on the aspect considered. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are then discussed. 1. Introduction The influence of family members, especially parents, on purchase decisions has received considerable research attention (Rojas-de-Gracia & Alarcón-Urbistondo, 2016). Three types of decision have been iden- tified in the literature according to which member of a couple – whe- ther married or not – exerts most influence: husband-dominant, wife- dominant, and joint (Davis & Rigaux, 1974). The first two indicate autonomous decisions, which are basically taken by one of the mem- bers, whereas a joint decision implies that both exert a similar influence (Litvin, Xu, & Kang, 2004). Studies on this subject have often been based on the response of one member of the couple (Bokek-Cohen & Lissitsa, 2010; Kozak & Karadag, 2012; Wang, Chen, & Chou, 2007; Yin, Cai, & Yin, 2009). Not all of them have then extended their findings to the other member, but many have, even though Davis (1970) noted that obtaining a response from only one member of a couple might be methodologically problematic, affecting the reliability and validity of the data. A smaller number of studies have collected more than one response per household, but nevertheless have based their analyses on the mean score for its members, assuming a high intrafamily correlation and therefore, a high level of agreement in perceptions of the influence exerted on family decision-making (Carrero & Aleti, 2017; Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006; Razzouk, Seitz, & Capo, 2007). However, several studies have confirmed Davis’ (1970) suspicion, finding that when more than one response per household is obtained, these do not always show agreement, also called dyadic consensus (Godwin & Scanzoni, 1989; Gram, 2013; Julien, Bouchard, Gagnon, & Pomerleau, 1992; Lee & Beatty, 2002). Heer (1963) defined dyadic consensus in a couple as the degree of agreement or disagreement in their perceptions of their relative influ- ence in decision-making. As a result of Heer’s study, the degree of consensus received greater attention in research on consumer behavior; however, such studies remain scarce and their conclusions have not obtained broad acceptance in the research community. Subsequently, this issue was largely forgotten as research turned to other, more popular questions, except in a few cases where consensus has been studied in a tangential manner (Carrero & Aleti, 2017; Penz & Kirchler, 2016; Rojas-de-Gracia & Alarcón-Urbistondo, 2018; Rojas-de-Gracia, Alarcón-Urbistondo, & González-Robles, 2018). The field of tourism is no exception, and the couple has often been considered as a unanimous decision-making unit. As a result, studies have often sought a response from only one member of a couple, usually the woman (Barlés-Arizón, Fraj-Andrés, & Matute-Vallejo, 2010; Green & Cunningham, 1975; Kerstetter & Pennington-Gray, 1999; Zalatan, 1998). However, the lack of studies on consensus in perceptions is even greater in the case of tourism decisions than for other types of product (Kang & Hsu, 2005; Rojas-de-Gracia & Alarcón-Urbistondo, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2019.03.005 Received 7 September 2018; Received in revised form 4 March 2019; Accepted 13 March 2019 ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mmrojasgracia@uma.es, mmrojasgracia@gmail.com (M.-M. Rojas-de-Gracia), pilar.alarcon@uma.es (P. Alarcón-Urbistondo), acasado@uma.es (A.-M. Casado-Molina). Journal of Destination Marketing & Management 12 (2019) 55–63 2212-571X/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T