This book explores the principal issues involved in bridging the gap between the pure theory of consumer behavior and its empirical implementation. The theoretical starting point is the familiar static, one-period, utility maximizing model in which the consumer allocates a fixed budget among competing categories of goods. The authors focus upon four issues of primary importance in empirical demand analysis: the structure of preferences, the treatment of demographic variables, treatment of dynamics, and the specification of the stochastic structure of the demand system.
This volume links the abstract theory of demand with its econometric implementation. Exercises lead the reader from elementary utility maximization to the most sophisticated recent techniques, highlighting the main steps in the historical evolution of the subject. The first part presents a brief discussion of duality and flexible forms, and in particular of Deaton and Muellbauer's ``almost ideal demand system''. Part two includes the author's work on true wage indexes, and on intertemporal utility maximization.
In a major work that is the culmination of over a decade of intensive research, Werner Hildenbrand presents a new theory of market demand, the principal aim of which is to identify the conditions under which the Law of Demand holds true. Hildenbrand argues that the Law of Demand is due mainly to the "heterogeneity" of the population of households. In his view, "rationality" of individual behavior plays only a minor role. While the traditional approach to the theory of market demand is to analyze the question, To what extent are the postulated properties of individual behavior preserved by going from individual to market demand?, this book asks the question, Which properties of the market demand function are created by the aggregation process?. Two hypotheses on the population of households play a key role in Hilden-brand's thinking. The first is the "increasing dispersion" and the second the "increasing spread" of households' demand. These hypotheses can easily be interpreted and are a priori plausible. For a positive theory of market demand, according to Hildenbrand, it is more important that the hypotheses are well supported by empirical evidence. His claims in this important new book are based on a nonparametric statistical data analysis of the U.K. Family Expenditure Survey and the French Enquête Budget de Famille. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
