Metonymy and Cross Section Demand

Igor Evstigneev, Werner Hildenbrand and Michael Jerison
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Werner Hildenbrand: Department of Economics, University of Bonn

No 1996046, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: Cross section consumer expenditure data are frequently used to make conclusions about consumer demand behavior. Such conclusions, however, can only be justified under certain assumptions, which are often left unstated in the empirical demand literature. An assumption of this type, the metonymy hypothesis, was stated rigorously and then exploited by Hardle, Hildenbrand and Jerison when analyzing the monotonicity property of aggregate demand functions. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the metonymy hypothesis in more detail. We prove that the distribution of demand vectors derived from a not necessarily metonymic population is identical to the distribution derived from some metonymic one. This implies, in particular, that the metonymy hypothesis cannot be rejected or confirmed on the basis of data from a single cross section.

Keywords: Cross section demand; Consumer expenditure data; Metonymy hypothesis; Law of Demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996-09-01
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Journal Article: Metonymy and cross-section demand (1997)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:1996046

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