A Collective Model of Household Behavior with Private and Public Goods: Theory and Some Evidence from U.S. Data

Olivier Donni

Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE

Abstract: In the present paper, we adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior-which supposes that each household member is characterized by his/her own preferences and that the decision process results in Pareto-efficient outcomes-and assume, in addition, that agents are egoistic and consumption is either private or public. The main results are based on a conditional demand ('m-demand') framework in which household demands are directly derived from the marginal rates of substitution. We show that (i) household demands have to satisfy testable constraints and (ii) some elements of the decision process can be retrieved from observed behavior. These theoretical considerations are followed by an empirical application using the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey. Overall, it turns out that the data are consistent with the theoretical model.

Keywords: Collective Decision; Intra-household Distribution; Demand Analysis; Private Goods; Public Good; Lindahl Price; GMM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D12 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cirpee.org/fileadmin/documents/Cahiers_2004/CIRPEE04-02.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:lvl:lacicr:0402

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().