This note proposes a necessary and sufficient condition on a preference to guarantee that the demand function it generates satisfies the law of demand. It shows that the law of demand may be succinctly characterized by differences in an agents level of risk aversion when she is confronted with...

This note determines the precise connection between an agent`s attitude towards income risks and his attitude over risks in the underlying consumption space. Our results follow a general mathematical theory connecting the curvature properties of an objective function with the ray-curvature...

A common theme in the theory of demand aggregation is that market demand can acquire properties which are not always individually present among the agents who make up that market, a phenomenon we call heterosis in this paper. This paper focusses on the well known result that with a suitable...

This paper examines conditions which guarantee that the excess demand function of an exchange economy will satisfy the weak axiom in an open neighborhood of a given equilibrium price. This property ensures that the equilibrium is locally stable with respect to Walras tatonnement. A related issue...

An observer makes a number of observations of an industry producing a homoge- neous good. Each observation consists of the market price, the output of individual firms and perhaps information on each firm's production cost. We provide vari- ous tests (typically, linear programs) with which the...

A preference over menus is said to be an indirect preference if it is induced by a preference over the objects that make up those menus, i.e., a menu A is ranked over B whenever A contains an object that is preferred to every object in B. The basic question we address in this paper is the...

We identify necessary and sufficient conditions under which a coarse data set can be coarsely rationalized by a linear order (or weak order). The conditions are easy to check, and efficient algorithms are provided. We apply our theory to investigate the observable restrictions of several...

We develop a nonparametric approach to test for monotone behavior in optimizing agents and to make out-of-sample predictions. Our approach could be applied to simultaneous games with ordered actions, with agents playing pure strategy Nash equilibria or Bayesian Nash equilibria. We require no...