We investigate the puzzle of microfinance: that loans generate large measured returns for businesses, yet loan take-up is low and the businesses often close. We analyze a randomized trial that bundled microfinance loans with a cheap health insurance policy. Requiring clients to purchase...

Abstract: Sharp nonparametric bounds are derived for Hicksian compensating and equivalent variations. These "i-bounds" generalize earlier results of Blundell, Browning and Crawford (2008). We show that their e-bounds are sharp under the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP). They do not...

Abstract: In the tradition of Afriat (1967), Diewert (1973) and Varian (1982), we provide a revealed preference characterisation of the representative consumer. Our results are simple and complement those of Gorman (1953, 1961), Samuelson (1956) and others. They can also be applied to data very...

This paper provides an efficient way to generate a set of random choices on a set of budgets which satisfy the Generalised Axiom of Revealed Preferences (GARP), that is, they are consistent with utility maximisation. The choices are drawn from an approximate uniform distribution on the...

We provide two new indices of efficiency for determining the degree of coherence in an agent's consumption decisions. We analyze to which extent they improve the efficiency displayed by Varian's (Journal of Econometrics, 1990) index. We report on the results of a Montecarlo experiment that...

The travel cost method (TCM) is a revealed preference approach to evaluating the recreation benefit. The traditional application of the TCM is to measure the consumer surplus of recreation sites and activities by calculating the consumer surplus of the site as the area below the demand function...

We derive necessary and sucient conditions for data sets composed of state-contingent prices and consumption to be consistent with two prominent models of decision making under uncertainty: variational preferences and smooth ambiguity. The revealed preference conditions for subjective expected...

According to a minimalist version of Afriat's theorem, a consumer behaves as a utility maximizer if and only if a feasibility matrix associated with his choices is cyclically consistent. An essential experiment consists of observed consumption bundles (x_1,..., x_n) and a feasibility matrix...

It is shown that preferences can be constructed from observed choice behavior in a way that is robust to indifferent selection (i.e., the agent is indifferent between two alternatives but, nevertheless, is only observed selecting one of them). More precisely, a suggestion by Savage [Savage,...