IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cwl/cwldpp/1399.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Strong Law of Demand

Author

Abstract

We show that a demand function is derived from maximizing a quasilinear utility function subject to a budget constraint if and only if the demand function is cyclically monotone. On finite data sets consisting of pairs of market prices and consumption vectors, this result is equivalent to a solution of the Afriat inequalities where all the marginal utilities of income are equal. We explore the implications of these results for maximization of a random quasilinear utility function subject to a budget constraint and for representative agent general equilibrium models. The duality theory for cyclically monotone demand is developed using the Legendre-Fenchel transform. In this setting, a consumer's surplus is measured by the conjugate of her utility function.

Suggested Citation

  • Donald J. Brown & Caterina Calsamiglia, 2003. "The Strong Law of Demand," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1399, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1399
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d13/d1399.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John Geanakoplos, 2013. "Afriat from MaxMin," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1904, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    2. Ruediger Bachmann, 2006. "Testable Implications of Pareto Efficiency and Individualrationality," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 29(3), pages 489-504, November.
    3. Daniel Friedman & József Sákovics, 2015. "Tractable consumer choice," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 79(2), pages 333-358, September.
    4. Donald J. Brown, 2014. "Approximate Solutions of the Walrasian Equilibrium Inequalities with Bounded Marginal Utilities of Income," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1955, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    5. John Geanakoplos, 2013. "Afriat from MaxMin," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 54(3), pages 443-448, November.
    6. Donald J. Brown & Caterina Calsamiglia, 2003. "Rationalizing and Curve-Fitting Demand Data with Quasilinear Utilities," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1399R, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, revised Jul 2004.
    7. Donald J. Brown & Ravi Kannan, 2003. "Indeterminacy, Nonparametric Calibration and Counterfactual Equilibria," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1426, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    8. Donald J. Brown, 2014. "Approximate Solutions of the Walrasian Equilibrium Inequalities with Bounded Marginal Utilities of Income," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1955R, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, revised Oct 2014.
    9. John Geanakoplos, 2013. "Afriat from MaxMin," Levine's Working Paper Archive 786969000000000746, David K. Levine.
    10. Bachmann, Ruediger, 2004. "Rationalizing allocation data--a nonparametric Walrasian theory when prices are absent or non-Walrasian," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(3-4), pages 271-295, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Permanent income hypothesis; Afriat's theorem; Law of demand; Consumer's surplus; Testable restrictions;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D11 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Theory
    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • D51 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Exchange and Production Economies

    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:cwl:cwldpp:1399. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Brittany Ladd (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cowleus.html .

    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.