Identification of consumers’ preferences when their choices are unobservable

We provide conditions under which the heterogenous, deterministic preferences of consumers in a pure exchange economy can be identified from the equilibrium manifold of the economy. We extend those conditions to consider exchange economies, with two commodities, where consumers’ preferences are random. For the latter, we provide conditions under which consumers’ heterogenous random preferences can be identified from the joint distribution of equilibrium prices and endowments. The results can be applied to infer consumers’ preferences when their demands are unobservable. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2005