In this paper, we adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior --- which supposes that each household member is characterized by his/her own preferences and the decision process results in Pareto-efficient outcomes --- and assume, in addition, that agents are egoistic and consumption is...

In cross-country/cross-region multilateral consumer price level comparisons, differences in the mix of food items consumed in individual countries pose a major problem. Comparison of the level of prices of food items in two countries will be difficult, if the sets of food items consumed in the...

The health status of individuals is of great importance not only because of the direct utility health can provide but because of productivity losses and large indirect costs, caused by ill-health, which places demands on already stretched health systems and family support networks. This is...

This study,using the Consumer Expenditure Surveys from 1984 through 1998, revisits the widely pronounced retirement-savings puzzle, which claims the existence of a sharp drop in consumption at the time of retirement. In contrast to previous work, I find that consumption of the retired households...

A partir de la Encuesta Salud, Bienestar y Envejecimiento (SABE) de la OPS-OMS (2001) se estiman los determinantes del estado de salud para los adultos mayores montevideanos (60 años y más). Se utilizan cuatro aproximaciones a dicho estado: limitaciones funcionales, autopercepción,...

In this paper, we analyze the strength and nature of bequest motives in the United States using data from the 2000 Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The results of our analysis suggest that bequest motives are very strong in the United States and that they are altruistically motivated. This...

This paper analyzes a unique dataset, which contains results of a large-scale experiment in the credit card market. Two strange phenomena that suggest time inconsistency in consumer behavior are observed: First, consumers prefer an introductory offer which has a lower interest rate with a...

We estimate individual risk attitudes using controlled experiments in the field in Denmark. These risk preferences are elicited by means of field experiments involving real monetary rewards. The experiments were carried out across Denmark using a representative sample of 253 people between 19...

In many markets consumer biases do not affect prices, since competition forces firms to price their products close to marginal cost; competition protects the consumer. We show that noisy consumer product evaluations undermine the force of competition, enabling firms to charge high mark-ups in...

This paper develops a monopolistic competition model to study the characteristics of products, such as quality improvement and product diversity (function-specialization and individualization), and the division of labor in production. Different from the ordinary economic model, our utility...