A revealed preference test for weakly separable preferences

John Quah

No 601, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Consider a finite data set of price vectors and consumption bundles; under what conditions will there be a weakly separable utlity function that rationalizes the data? This paper shows that rationalization in this sense is possible if and only if there exists a preference order on some finite set of consumption bundles that is consistent with the observations and that is weakly separable. Since there can only be a finite number of preference orders on this set, the problem of rationalization with a weakly separable utility function is solvable.

Keywords: Afriat's theorem; Concave utility function; Budget set; Generalized axiom of revealed preference; Preorder (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C60 C61 D11 D12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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