Using Elasticities from an Almost Ideal Demand System? Watch Out for Group Expenditure!

Group expenditure has often been treated as exogenous when estimating demand parameters for a group of commodities with an almost ideal demand system. Researchers draw demand elasticities from past literature to use in their own analysis, but elasticities contingent on exogenous group expenditure may be inappropriate. Here, the approach is considered in the case of Japanese meat demand with a simple equation added to estimate group expenditures. The results show that elasticities should be revised and that a group expenditure equation is not a panacea as it may result in the violation of theoretical restrictions, such as symmetry. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Information theoretic measures of the income distribution in food demand

A new method to nest, estimate and test the rank and functional form of the income terms in an incomplete system of demand equations is developed. Information theory is employed to infer the U.S. income distribution from data on quintile and top five percentile income ranges and intra-quintile and top five percentile mean incomes. Maximum entropy income distributions are combined with data on the U.S. demand for 21 food items to estimate U.S. food demand over the period 1919–1995, excluding 1942–1946

A Three-Level Approach for Analyzing User Behavior in Ongoing Relationships

Peer-reviewedThis paper describes a hybrid methodology to study users in ongoing relationships based on three levels of user data analysis