IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2111.01248.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A General Revealed Preference Test for Quasilinear Preferences: Theory and Experiments

Author

Listed:
  • Mikhail Freer
  • Marco Castillo

Abstract

We provide a generalized revealed preference test for quasilinear preferences. The test applies to nonlinear budget sets and non-convex preferences as those found in taxation and nonlinear pricing contexts. We study the prevalence of quasilinear preferences in a laboratory real-effort task experiment with nonlinear wages. The experiment demonstrates the empirical relevance of our test. We find support for either convex (non-separable) preferences or quasilinear preferences but weak support for the hypothesis of both quasilinear and convex preferences.

Suggested Citation

  • Mikhail Freer & Marco Castillo, 2021. "A General Revealed Preference Test for Quasilinear Preferences: Theory and Experiments," Papers 2111.01248, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2111.01248
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.01248
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Becker, Gary S, 1974. "A Theory of Social Interactions," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 82(6), pages 1063-1093, Nov.-Dec..
    2. Cherchye, Laurens & Demuynck, Thomas & De Rock, Bram, 2015. "Is utility transferable? a revealed preference analysis," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 10(1), January.
    3. Donald J. Brown & Caterina Calsamiglia, 2008. "The Nonparametric Approach to Applied Welfare Analysis," Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, in: Computational Aspects of General Equilibrium Theory, pages 41-46, Springer.
    4. Forges, Françoise & Minelli, Enrico, 2009. "Afriat's theorem for general budget sets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(1), pages 135-145, January.
    5. Cherchye, Laurens & Demuynck, Thomas & De Rock, Bram, 2015. "Is utility transferable? a revealed preference analysis," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 10(1), January.
    6. Chambers,Christopher P. & Echenique,Federico, 2016. "Revealed Preference Theory," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107087804, January.
    7. Fisman, Raymond J & Kariv, Shachar & Markovits, Daniel, 2005. "Individual Preferences for Giving," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt3h7672sq, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    8. Laurens Cherchye & Bram De Rock & Frederic Vermeulen, 2012. "Married with Children: A Collective Labor Supply Model with Detailed Time Use and Intrahousehold Expenditure Information," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(7), pages 3377-3405, December.
    9. Maria Porter & Abi Adams, 2016. "For Love or Reward? Characterising Preferences for Giving to Parents in an Experimental Setting," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 126(598), pages 2424-2445, December.
    10. Hugh Rose, 1958. "Consistency of Preference: The Two-Commodity Case," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 25(2), pages 124-125.
    11. Hunt Allcott & Dmitry Taubinsky, 2015. "Evaluating Behaviorally Motivated Policy: Experimental Evidence from the Lightbulb Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(8), pages 2501-2538, August.
    12. Green, Jerry & Laffont, Jean-Jacques, 1977. "On the revelation of preferences for public goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 79-93, August.
    13. Laurens Cherchye & Thomas Demuynck & Bram De Rock & Frederic Vermeulen, 2017. "Household Consumption When the Marriage Is Stable," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(6), pages 1507-1534, June.
    14. Green, Jerry & Laffont, Jean-Jacques, 1977. "Characterization of Satisfactory Mechanisms for the Revelation of Preferences for Public Goods," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 45(2), pages 427-438, March.
    15. James Andreoni & Charles Sprenger, 2012. "Estimating Time Preferences from Convex Budgets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(7), pages 3333-3356, December.
    16. Ned Augenblick & Muriel Niederle & Charles Sprenger, 2015. "Editor's Choice Working over Time: Dynamic Inconsistency in Real Effort Tasks," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 130(3), pages 1067-1115.
    17. Toussaert, Séverine, 2018. "Eliciting temptation and self-control through menu choices: a lab experiment," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 88107, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    18. Jan Heufer, 2013. "Testing revealed preferences for homotheticity with two-good experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 16(1), pages 114-124, March.
    19. Raymond Fisman & Shachar Kariv & Daniel Markovits, 2007. "Individual Preferences for Giving," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(5), pages 1858-1876, December.
    20. Giulia Giupponi, 2019. "When income effects are large: labor supply responses and the value of welfare transfers," CEP Discussion Papers dp1651, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    21. Matthew Polisson, 2018. "A lattice test for additive separability," IFS Working Papers W18/08, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    22. Mikhail Golosov & Michael Graber & Magne Mogstad & David Novgorodsky, 2024. "How Americans Respond to Idiosyncratic and Exogenous Changes in Household Wealth and Unearned Income," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 139(2), pages 1321-1395.
    23. Syngjoo Choi & Raymond Fisman & Douglas Gale & Shachar Kariv, 2007. "Consistency and Heterogeneity of Individual Behavior under Uncertainty," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(5), pages 1921-1938, December.
    24. David Cesarini & Erik Lindqvist & Matthew J. Notowidigdo & Robert Östling, 2017. "The Effect of Wealth on Individual and Household Labor Supply: Evidence from Swedish Lotteries," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(12), pages 3917-3946, December.
    25. Séverine Toussaert, 2018. "Eliciting Temptation and Self†Control Through Menu Choices: A Lab Experiment," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 86(3), pages 859-889, May.
    26. Bergstrom, Theodore C & Cornes, Richard C, 1983. "Independence of Allocative Efficiency from Distribution in the Theory of Public Goods," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(6), pages 1753-1765, November.
    27. Nocke, Volker & Schutz, Nicolas, 2017. "Quasi-linear integrability," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 169(C), pages 603-628.
    28. Matzkin, Rosa L, 1991. "Axioms of Revealed Preference for Nonlinear Choice Sets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(6), pages 1779-1786, November.
    29. Cherchye, Laurens & Demuynck, Thomas & De Rock, Bram, 2015. "Is utility transferable? a revealed preference analysis," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 10(1), January.
    30. Roger B. Myerson, 1981. "Optimal Auction Design," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 6(1), pages 58-73, February.
    31. Laurens Cherchye & Thomas Demuynck & Bram De Rock & Joshua Lanier, 2020. "Are Consumers Rational ?Shifting the Burden of Proof," Working Papers ECARES 2020-19, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    32. repec:dau:papers:123456789/4099 is not listed on IDEAS
    33. Francoise Forges & Enrico Minelli, 2009. "Afriat's theorem for generalized budget sets," Post-Print hal-00360726, HAL.
    34. Chen, Daniel L. & Schonger, Martin & Wickens, Chris, 2016. "oTree—An open-source platform for laboratory, online, and field experiments," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 9(C), pages 88-97.
    35. Rochet, Jean-Charles, 1987. "A necessary and sufficient condition for rationalizability in a quasi-linear context," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 191-200, April.
    36. James Andreoni & John Miller, 2002. "Giving According to GARP: An Experimental Test of the Consistency of Preferences for Altruism," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(2), pages 737-753, March.
    37. Giupponi, Giulia, 2019. "When income effects are large: labor supply responses and the value of welfare transfers," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103424, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marco Castillo & Mikhail Freer, 2023. "A general revealed preference test for quasilinear preferences: theory and experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 26(3), pages 673-696, July.
    2. Pawe{l} Dziewulski & Joshua Lanier & John K. -H. Quah, 2024. "Revealed preference and revealed preference cycles: a survey," Papers 2405.08459, arXiv.org.
    3. Pawel Dziewulski, 2021. "A comprehensive revealed preference approach to approximate utility maximisation," Working Paper Series 0621, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    4. Mikhail Freer & César Martinelli, 2023. "An algebraic approach to revealed preference," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 75(3), pages 717-742, April.
    5. Ian Crawford & Bram De Rock, 2014. "Empirical Revealed Preference," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 503-524, August.
    6. Dziewulski, Paweł, 2020. "Just-noticeable difference as a behavioural foundation of the critical cost-efficiency index," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 188(C).
    7. Yoram Halevy & Dotan Persitz & Lanny Zrill, 2018. "Parametric Recoverability of Preferences," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 126(4), pages 1558-1593.
    8. Pawel Dziewulski, 2018. "Just-noticeable difference as a behavioural foundation of the critical cost-efficiency," Economics Series Working Papers 848, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    9. Castillo, Marco E. & Cross, Philip J. & Freer, Mikhail, 2019. "Nonparametric utility theory in strategic settings: Revealing preferences and beliefs from proposal–response games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 60-82.
    10. Müller, Daniel, 2019. "The anatomy of distributional preferences with group identity," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 785-807.
    11. Uttara Balakrishnan & Johannes Haushofer & Pamela Jakiela, 2020. "How soon is now? Evidence of present bias from convex time budget experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 23(2), pages 294-321, June.
    12. Sam Cosaert & Thomas Demuynck, 2015. "Revealed preference theory for finite choice sets," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 59(1), pages 169-200, May.
    13. Federico Echenique & Taisuke Imai & Kota Saito, 2020. "Testable Implications of Models of Intertemporal Choice: Exponential Discounting and Its Generalizations," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 12(4), pages 114-143, November.
    14. Heufer, Jan & Hjertstrand, Per, 2019. "Homothetic preferences revealed," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 602-614.
    15. Laurens Cherchye & Thomas Demuynck & Bram De Rock & Joshua Lanier, 2020. "Are Consumers Rational ?Shifting the Burden of Proof," Working Papers ECARES 2020-19, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    16. Daniel Müller, 2017. "The anatomy of distributional preferences with group identity," Working Papers 2017-02, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck, revised Mar 2017.
    17. Changkuk Im & John Rehbeck, 2021. "Non-rationalizable Individuals, Stochastic Rationalizability, and Sampling," Papers 2102.03436, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    18. Joshua Lanier & Bin Miao & John K.-H. Quah & Songfa Zhong, 2024. "Intertemporal Consumption with Risk: A Revealed Preference Analysis," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 106(5), pages 1319-1333, September.
    19. Thomas Demuynck & John Rehbeck, 2023. "Computing revealed preference goodness-of-fit measures with integer programming," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 76(4), pages 1175-1195, November.
    20. Laurens CHERCHYE & Thomas DEMUYNCK & Bram DE ROCK, 2010. "Noncooperative household consumption with caring," Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven ces10.34, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2111.01248. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.