Preferences and the Dynamic Representative Consumer

Christos Koulovatianos

Vienna Economics Papers from University of Vienna, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper provides families of time-separable, twice continuously differentiable, and strictly concave utility functions of a group of consumers that are both suffcient and necessary in order to have linear aggregation in a single-commodity-type deterministic dynamic environment, in the presence of consumer wealth-, labor-productivity, and preference heterogeneity, for alternative settings where the rates of time preference can be the same or different across consumers. The employed concept of linear aggregation pertains the existence of a representative consumer with a time-separable utility function. It is proved that when the rates of time preference are choice-independent and heterogeneous across consumers, a representative consumer exists if, and only if, the momentary utility functions of all consumers are exponential. Results are also provided for, (i) common across consumers choice-independent rates of time preference, and, (ii) heterogeneous choice-dependent rates of time preference, and compared with previously identified sufficient conditions for aggregation in the existing literature.

JEL-codes: D11 D31 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-05
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