Beyond the Mean: Testing Consumer Rationality through Higher Moments of Demand

• Tác giả: Sebastiaan Maes, Raghav Malhotra
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 128.33 Reason and rationality
• Thông tin xuất bản: 2024
• Bộ sưu tập: Metadata
• ID: 203224

Tóm tắt

 Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2303.01231We study a setting where an analyst has access to purely aggregate information about the consumption choices of a heterogenous population of individuals. We show that observing the statistical moments of market demand allows the analyst to test aggregate data for rationality. Interestingly, just the mean and variance of demand carry observable restrictions. This is in stark contrast to impossibility result of the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, which shows that aggregate demand carries no observable restrictions at all. We leverage our approach to deliver a characterization of rationality in terms of moments for the common two-good case. We illustrate the usefulness of moment-based restrictions through two applications: (i) improving the precision of demand and welfare estimates
  and (ii) testing for the existence of a welfare-relevant representative consumer.