Tài liệu tham khảo Tài liệu trung cấp môn Kinh tế vi mô bằng tiếng Anh gồm 41 phần giúp sinh viên khoa kinh tế học tốt môn Kinh tế vi mô. Tài liệu này là phần 8 giới thiệu về " Tiết lộ ưu đãi - Revealed Preference " | CHAPTER REVEALED PREFERENCE In Chapter 6 we saw how we can use information about the consumer s preferences and budget constraint to determine his or her demand. In this chapter we reverse this process and show how we can use information about the consumer s demand to discover information about his or her preferences. Up until now we were thinking about what preferences could tell us about people s behavior. But in real life preferences are not directly observable we have to discover people s preferences from observing their behavior. In this chapter we ll develop some tools to do this. When we talk of determining people s preferences from observing their behavior we have to assume that the preferences will remain unchanged while we observe the behavior. Over very long time spans this is not very reasonable. But for the monthly or quarterly time spans that economists usually deal with it seems unlikely that a particular consumer s tastes would change radically. Thus we will adopt a maintained hypothesis that the consumer s preferences are stable over the time period for which we observe his or her choice behavior. THE IDEA OF REVEALED PREFERENCE 119 The Idea of Revealed Preference Before we begin this investigation let s adopt the convention that in this chapter the underlying preferences whatever they may be - are known to be strictly convex. Thus there will be a unique demanded bundle at each budget. This assumption is not necessary for the theory of revealed preference but the exposition will be simpler with it. Consider Figure where we have depicted a consumer s demanded bundle xi X2 and another arbitrary bundle that is beneath the consumer s budget line. Suppose that we are willing to postulate that this consumer is an optimizing consumer of the sort we have been studying. What can we say about the consumer s preferences between these two bundles of goods 1 Revealed preference. The bundle zi x that the consumer chooses is revealed preferred to the .
