The Implications of Additive Community Preferences in a Multi-consumer Economy.

The authors investigate the consequences of imposing additivity on community preferences. They show that there are import ant implications of additive community preferences that are not implied. by the additivity of a single consumer's preferences. In particular, th ey show that imposing additivity on community preferences implies the existence of a representative consumer with a utility function in th e constant elasticity of substitution family. The authors demonstrate the restrictive nature of these implications with three examples. Their interpretation of the resul ts is that single-consumer models are unable to adequately represent important features of multiconsumer economies. Copyright 1993 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.