On the confirmation of the law of demand

Philippe Mongin

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The paper applies confirmation theory to a famous statement of economics, the law of demand, which says that ceteris paribus, prices and quantities demanded change in opposite directions. Today's economists do not accept the law unless definite restrictions hold, and have shown little interest in deciding whether or not these restrictions were satisfied empirically. However, Hildenbrand (1994) has provided a new derivation of the law of aggregate demand and used this theoretical advance to devise a test that may be the first rigorous one ever performed on the law. The paper accounts for Hildenbrand's and, in less detail, his predecessors' contributions within the philosophical framework of Hempel (1965) and Glymour (1980). Its salient result is that economists have accepted the "consequence condition", and rejected the "converse consequence condition", and thus implicitly adhered to a Hempelian- Glymourian view of confirmation and testability.

JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2006
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/58432/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: On the Confirmation of the Law of Demand (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:58432

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