Transitive preferences in multi-member households

Bart Smeulders, Laurens Cherchye, Bram De Rock, Frits C. R. Spieksma and Fabrice Talla Nobibon
Additional contact information
Bart Smeulders: University of Leuven
Frits C. R. Spieksma: University of Leuven
Fabrice Talla Nobibon: University of Leuven

Economic Theory Bulletin, 2015, vol. 3, issue 2, No 10, 243-254

Abstract: Abstract The classical result of Rose (Rev Econ Stud, 25:124–125, 1958) shows that, for single-member households, the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preferences (warp) and the Strong Axiom of Revealed Preferences (sarp) are equivalent when there are only two goods. Because sarp extends warp by requiring transitive preferences in addition, this means that transitivity of preferences need not be tested in the case of two goods. We consider the extension of this result towards $$L$$ L -member households, for which we introduce the concepts $$L$$ L -warp and $$L$$ L -sarp. For a general setting, we demonstrate that $$L$$ L -warp and $$L$$ L -sarp are not equivalent if there are at least $$L+1$$ L + 1 goods, which means that transitivity of individual preferences is testable. However, we can also show that $$L$$ L -warp and $$L$$ L -sarp do become equivalent for the restricted “labor supply” setting where we exclusively assign a single good to each different household member, i.e., $$L$$ L (out of $$L+1$$ L + 1 ) goods are exclusive.

Keywords: Weak axiom of revealed preferences; Strong axiom of revealed preferences; Multi-member households; Transitivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 D11 D12 D13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40505-014-0053-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Transitive Preferences in Multi-Member Households (2014)
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:spr:etbull:v:3:y:2015:i:2:d:10.1007_s40505-014-0053-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40505

DOI: 10.1007/s40505-014-0053-5

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory Bulletin is currently edited by Nicholas C. Yannelis

More articles in Economic Theory Bulletin from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().