Conferences at Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canadian Economic Theory Conference 2013

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A revealed preference test for weakly separable preferences

John K.-H. Quah*

Last modified: 2013-04-17

Abstract


Consider a finite data set of price vectors and consumption bundles; under what conditions will be there a weakly separable utility 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

 


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