Identities for Homogeneous Utility Functions

Miguel Espinosa Farfan (espinomics@gmail.com) and Juan Prada Sarmiento (jdprada@u.northwestern.edu)

Economics Bulletin, 2012, vol. 32, issue 3, 2026-2034

Abstract: Using a homogeneous and continuous utility function to represent a household's preferences, we show explicit algebraic ways to go from the indirect utility function to the expenditure function and from the Marshallian demand to the Hicksian demand and vice versa, without the need of any other function. This greatly simplifies the integrability problem, avoiding the use of differential equations. In order to get this result, we prove explicit identities between most of the different objects that arise from the utility maximization and the expenditure minimization problems.

Keywords: Integrability; identities; homogeneous utility function; household theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07-20
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Identities For Homogeneous Utility Functions (2010)
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