IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fgv/epgewp/87.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The consistency of welfare judgements with a representative consumer

Author

Listed:
  • Dow, James
  • Werlang, Sérgio Ribeiro da Costa

Abstract

This paper is about economies with a representative consumer. In general a representative consumer need not exist, although there are several well known sets of sufficient conditions under which Qne will. It is common practice, however, to use the representative consumer hypothesis without specifically assuming any of these. We show, firstly, that it is possible for the utility of the representative consumer to increase when every actual consumer is made worse off. This shows a serious shortcoming of welfare judgements based on the representatíve consumer. Secondly, in economies where this does not occur, there exists a social welfare function, which we construct, which is consistent with welfare judgements based on the utility of the representative consumer. Finally we provide a converse to Samuelson' s 1956 representative consumer result, which relates it to Scitovsky's community indifference curves.

Suggested Citation

  • Dow, James & Werlang, Sérgio Ribeiro da Costa, 1986. "The consistency of welfare judgements with a representative consumer," FGV EPGE Economics Working Papers (Ensaios Economicos da EPGE) 87, EPGE Brazilian School of Economics and Finance - FGV EPGE (Brazil).
    • Handle: RePEc:fgv:epgewp:87
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repositorio.fgv.br/bitstreams/82221bf7-88ae-4288-920d-3b36fb7ba4d9/download
    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. Laurens CHERCHYE & Ian CRAWFORD & Bram DE ROCK & Frederic VERMEULEN, 2011. "Aggregation without the aggravation? Nonparametric analysis of the representative consumer," Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven ces11.36, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven.
    2. Andreas Chai & Christian Kiedaisch & Nicholas Rohde, 2021. "The saturation of household spending diversity and emergent properties of representative households," DeFiPP Working Papers 2104, University of Namur, Development Finance and Public Policies.
    3. Laurens CHERCHYE & Ian CRAWFORD & Bram DE ROCK & Frederic VERMEULEN, 2013. "Gorman revisited: nonparametric conditions for exact linear aggregation," Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven ces13.05, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven.
    4. Edward E. Schlee, 2001. "The Value of Information in Efficient Risk-Sharing Arrangements," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(3), pages 509-524, June.
    5. Richard A. Brecher & Ngo Van Long, 1989. "Trade Unions in an Open Economy: A General Equilibrium Analysis," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 65(3), pages 234-239, September.
    6. Michael Jerison, 2023. "Social welfare and the unrepresentative representative consumer," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 25(1), pages 5-28, February.
    7. Chambers, Christopher P., 2012. "Inequality aversion and risk aversion," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 147(4), pages 1642-1651.
    8. Michael Jerison, 1997. "Nonrepresentative Representative Consumers," Discussion Papers 97-01, University at Albany, SUNY, Department of Economics.
    9. Laurens CHERCHYE & Ian CRAWFORD & Bram DE ROCK & Frederic VERMEULEN, 2011. "Aggregation without the aggravation? Nonparametric analysis of the representative consumer," Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven ces11.36, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven.
    10. Chambers, Christopher P. & Hayashi, Takashi, 2023. "The structure of representative preference," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(C).
    11. Rachmilevitch, Shiran, 2016. "Social objectives in general equilibrium," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 148(C), pages 99-102.
    12. Laurens Cherchye & Ian Crawford & Bram De Rock & Frederic Vermeulen, 2015. "Revealed Preference and Aggregation," Working Papers ECARES ECARES 2015-08, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

    More about this item

    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:fgv:epgewp:87. 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: Núcleo de Computação da FGV EPGE (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/epgvfbr.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.