The pupose of the present paper is to examine the metonymy hypothesis in more detail. We prove that the distribution of demand vectors derived from a not necessarily metonymic population is identical to the distribution derived from some metonymic one.

For market demand to satisfy the law of demand, it is sufficient that the mean of all households' income effect matrices is positive definite. The authors show how this mean income effect matrix can be estimated from cross section data under metonymy, an assumption about the distribution of...

Cross section consumer expenditure data are frequently used to make conclusions about consumer demand behavior. Such conclusions, however, can only be justified under certain assumptions, which are often left unstated in the empirical demand literature. An assumption of this type, the metonymy...

Cross section consumer expenditure data are frequently used to make conclusions about consumer demand behavior. Such conclusions, however, can only be justified under certain assumptions, which are often left unstated in the empirical demand literature. An assumption of this type, the metonymy...