Following Richter (1966), we provide criteria under which a preference relation implied by a finite set of choice observations has a complete extension that can in turn be represented by a utility function. These criteria rely on a mapping over preference relations, the rational closure, which is a generalization of the transitive closure and is employed to construct the complete extension. We ...

The transferable utility hypothesis underlies important theoretical results in household economics. We provide a revealed preference framework for bringing this (theoretically appealing) hypothesis to observational data. We establish revealed preference conditions that must be satisfied for observed household consumption behavior to be consistent with transferable utility. We also show that the...

Evaluating the merits of alternative tax and incomes policies often requires knowledge of their impact on consumer demand and welfare. Attempts to quantify these impacts are complicated; aggregate demand responses depend on the population distribution of preferences for commodities, yet consumer preferences go unobserved and economic theory places few restrictions on their form and distribution...

There are three key dimensions by which revealed preference bounds on consumer demand responses to price variation can be improved. The first relates to the improvements that arise from using expansion paths for given relative prices, E-bounds. The second concerns the addition of new price information. Thirdly, there are improvements due to assuming separability. Our previous research has exami...

We provide a time-consistent model that addresses the preference reversals that motivate the time-inconsistency literature. The model subsumes the behavior generated by the time-inconsistency approach in finite settings but, unlike the time-inconsistent models, allows for self-control. This paper provides a brief summary of theoretical results shown elsewhere [Gul and Pesendorfer, Econometrica ...

As mentioned in the Introduction, it has the following goals: to develop the main topics of revealed preference theory (rationality, revealed preference, congruence, consistency) for a large class of fuzzy choice functions, to explore new topics (degree of dominance, similarity, indicators of rationality) specific to a fuzzy approach to choice functions and to show the manner in which some prob...

This paper discusses how to improve the identification of the preference of a decision maker (DM) with limited attention proposed by Masatlioglu, Nakajima, and Ozbay (2012). Their identification method relies on choice reversals so the obtained revealed preference is often very incomplete. We propose three approaches to address this problem. The first one is accommodating to a model-free approa...

The analysis of extensive-form games involves assumptions concerning players’ beliefs at histories off the predicted path of play. However, the revealed-preference interpretation of such assumptions is unclear: how does one elicit probabilities conditional upon events that have zero ex-ante probability? This paper addresses this issue by proposing and axiomatizing a novel choice criterion for a...

I describe a goodness-of-fit measure for revealed preference tests. This index can be used to measure the degree to which an economic agent violates the model of utility maximization. I calculate the violation indices for a 38 consumers and find that the observed choice behavior is very close to optimizing behavior.

Quite oddly, it is extremely seldom in the literature for economists to concern with the critical investigation to revealed preference theory during its seventy-five years history since 1938 when Samuelson first proposed it, so that even if a critical glance at the initial notion of revealed preference can bring us surprising findings which will be enough to reverse the traditional view on this...