Chapter 18 Duality for the household: Theory and applications

This chapter presents the theory of consumer choice as applied to household behavior. An internally consistent, self-contained framework is developed for the analysis of consumer preferences, household production, quality attributes, and produced nonmarket commodities in static and dynamic environments. Consumer expectations and naive and rational habit formation are considered in detail. The emphasis is on developing an internally consistent duality for consumer choice theory in each of these contexts. The chapter develops a general, logically consistent modeling framework for the applied economic analysis of consumption choices by the household.