EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Homothetic or Cobb-Douglas Behavior Through Aggregation

Gaël Giraud and John Quah

The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, 2003, vol. 3, issue 1, 23

Abstract: A common theme in the theory of demand aggregation is that market demand can acquire properties which are not always individually present among the agents who make up that market, a phenomenon we call heteroiosis in this paper. This paper focusses on the well known result that with a suitable distribution of demand behavior (arising perhaps from the underlying distribution of preferences), market demand can become an approximately linear function of income or even take on approximately Cobb-Douglas properties. We highlight the mathematical arguments underpinning these models and show that in the right context, it is possible to carry the arguments further and achieve exact, rather than just approximate, results: exact Cobb-Douglas market demand or exact linearity of market demand with respect to income.

Keywords: heteroiosis; heterogeneity; Cobb-Douglas; homotheticity; law of demand; aggregation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1534-5971.1058 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: Homothetic or Cobb-Douglas Behavior Through Aggregation (2003)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:bejtec:v:contributions.3:y:2003:i:1:n:8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejte/html

DOI: 10.2202/1534-5971.1058

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics is currently edited by Burkhard C. Schipper

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:bpj:bejtec:v:contributions.3:y:2003:i:1:n:8