Rational Non-addictive Eating: Cycles, Overweightness, and Underweightness

Amnon Levy ()

Economics Working Papers from School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Abstract: Although a deviation from the physiologically optimal weight increases the probability of dying, the steady state for a lifetime expected-utility maximiser is a state of overweightness. However, even a small initial deviation from this rationally stationary weight is followed by explosive oscillations. These oscillations might lead to severe and chronic underweightness in a late stage of life. In the presence of socio-cultural norms of appearance, the rationally stationary weight of fat people is lower than otherwise and the rationally stationary weight of lean people is greater than otherwise.

Keywords: Rational eating; cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-mic
Date: 2000

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@ ... ts/doc/uow012099.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:uow:depec1:wp00-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia
Address: School of Economics, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ed Wilson ().