The paper provides several axiomatizations of the concept of "path independence" as applied to choice functions defined over finite sets. The axioms are discussed in terms of their relationship to "rationality" postulates and their meaning with respect to social choice models.
[The effect of economic constraints upon fertility are analyzed within the theory of household production and allocation of time. The interaction of individual components of family income and the direct economic costs of children are shown to have an increasingly large impact upon Swedish fertility as industrialization proceeds.]
How should rule-of-thumb priorities be assigned for the rationing of intermediate goods in an economy marked by shortages and non-scarcity prices? A method is developed for setting these priorities in an optimal way, and the method is applied to Soviet data as an illustration. 1.
[This paper develops an iterative procedure for estimating "specific" and "income" consumer unit scales in Engel curve analysis. The proposed procedure is essentially a modification of the Prais and Houthakker method and is illustrated by means of a numerical example based on the Indian National Sample Survey data.]
[The properties of systems of investment equations derived under the hypothesis of present value maximization are investigated. The possibility that either the optimal time rate of change in some factor or the stationary level of some stock may increase with its own rental rate is shown to be consistent with the hypothesis in the case of more than one factor. A condition necessary for this result is that marginal products depend on the rates of which factor levels are justified.]
[This paper is concerned with showing differentiability and measure theoretic properties on demand functions. The main results are roughly as follows. (i) Demand is differentiable and the Slutsky equation holds for almost all prices if demand satisfies a Lipschitz condition in income (except possibly for a closed cone of prices of measure zero) and utility is concave. This includes the homothetic case which is given special attention in Section 4. (ii) For the Slutsky equation to indicate demand behavior in the large, it is sufficient that along any given indifference curve the ratio of changes in price to changes in quantity be bounded from zero (Section 5). (iii) Even with almost everywhere differentiable demand derived from continuously differentiable utility, most change in demand does not necessarily take place where the Slutsky equation is valid (Section 5). (iv) By way of proof of Theorems 1-3, it is shown that the maximand in a Lagrange problem is differentiable under appropriate conditions on the function being maximized (Theorem 6, Section 3, and Appendix). (v) For preferences as in (ii) and for almost all wealths, equilibrium is locally unique (Section 6).]