Collective Household Consumption Behavior

Download or read book Collective Household Consumption Behavior written by Laurens Cherchye and published by Foundations & Trends. This book was released on 2012-03 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collective Household Consumption Behavior: Revealed Preference Analysis presents a nonparametric `revealed preference' methodology for analyzing collective consumption behavior in practical applications, while possibly accounting for externalities, public consumption and the use of assignable quantity information. Collective Household Consumption Behavior: Revealed Preference Analysis considers two types of collective models: The general collective model considers general preferences of the individual household members, which allow for externalities and public consumption within the household. The special collective models that do not allow for consumption externalities. After the introduction, section 2 sets the stage by introducing the revealed preference characterizations of the unitary model. Section 3 presents a collective model that allows for general individual preferences and discusses its revealed preference characterization. Sections 4 and 5 show how to bring this theoretical characterization to observational data. More specifically, Section 4 introduces the mixed integer programming characterizations for special collective models that impose restrictions on the household members' preferences. Section 5 does the same for the general collective model. Throughout Section 2 to Section 5, the authors illustrate the most relevant concepts by means of numerical examples. In Section 6 we subsequently illustrate our main results for data drawn from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey.