Houthakker and Ville's contributions to demand theory: a new look at the debate on integrability conditions.

Abstract

Jean Ville gave, independently of Houthakker, and prior to him, a general one page proof of the integrability of demand functions in a revealed preference scheme. It happens that this essential contribution has been largely ignored in the literature. The comparison between Ville and Houthakker’s proofs makes room for discussing the assumptions necessary to encompass the discrete version of the acyclicity into a continuous version.