The paper illustrates the methodological and analytical issues that characterized, as well as the personal and institutional aspects that informed the discussions leading to the definition of the current notion of cardinal utility as utility unique up to positive linear transformations. As...

This paper illustrates the methodological and analytical issues that characterized, as well as the personal and institutional aspects that informed the discussions leading to the definition of the current notion of cardinal utility as utility unique up to positive linear transformations. As...

We characterize optimal consumption policies in a recursive intertemporal utility framework with local substitution. We establish existence and uniqueness and a version of the Kuhn-Tucker theorem characterizing the optimal consumption plan. An explicit solution is provided for the case when the...

We solve Ireland's (1994) conspicuous consumption model (where social-status concerns are introduced into the utility function) for Cobb-Douglas (CD) utility. In the resulting generalized CD consumer model, Engel curves are no longer limited to linearity. In the homothetic CD case, total...

This paper presents a new model of time-additive consumption-wealth utility. Like recursive utility, this model separates the roles of risk aversion and the intertemporal elasticity of consumption allowing it to be calibrated to a wider variety of data. Indeed, the observed equity premium and...

This paper uses the notion of augmented utility to summarize models of utility maximization (MUM). The models covered include non-separable utility maximization and common behavioral models of discounting. Moreover, the paper provides as novel special cases necessary and sufficient conditions...

This note provides a nonparametric test for dynamic discrete random utility models (DDRUM). The methodology can be used to understand the welfare implications of price changes in demand data when there is no uncertainty for consumers that have preferences over product characteristics or discrete...

[enter Abstract Body]Utility theory is a pivotal concept in economics which provides insights into how an individual is motivated to act under their budget constraint. The main assumption of this theory and the entire economics is a rational human being and an individual derives utility from the...