Household production theory and models

The chapter focuses on household production theory and models for non-agricultural households, largely in developed countries. The objectives of the paper are: (1) to present several types of microeconomic models of household decision making and highlight their implications for empirical food demand studies and (2) to presents an empirical application of insights gained from household production theory for a household input demand system fitted to unique data on the US household sector over the post-World War II period, 1948-1996. Regarding future research, suggestions are presented as to how food demand studies might build a stronger bridge to new models of household behavior, including a household production function and allocation of the household's time and full-income constraints.