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Understanding consumption patterns

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Abstract

The analysis of consumer demand is one of the major successes of economics as it represents the near perfect marriage of theory and econometrics. This paper reviews, distills and systematises some of the major empirical findings on consumption patterns, concentrating in particular on the more recent (and, in some cases, more controversial) evidence. One of the key conclusions of the paper is that on the basis on new methods, the hypotheses of homogeneity, symmetry and preference independence are not at such wide variance with the data as was once thought to be the case.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economic Research Centre, Department of Economics, The University of Western Australia, 6009, Nedlands Perth, Western Australia, Australia

    Kenneth W. Clements

  2. School of Commerce and Administration, Griffith University, 6009, Perth, Western Australia, Australia

    Saroja Selvanathan

  3. Economic Research Centre, Department of Economics, The University of Western Australia, 6009, Perth, Western Australia, Australia

    Saroja Selvanathan

Authors
  1. Kenneth W. Clements
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  2. Saroja Selvanathan
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Additional information

We are grateful to Dongling Chen, Daranee Chenhall and Ken Cole for their help in producing this paper; and to Ranjan Ray, Antony Selvanathan, David Treloar and two anonymous referees of this journal for useful comments. Clements is pleased to acknowledge the support of an ARC grant. Sections 4 and 5 of this paper draw on Clements, E. A. Selvanathan and S. Selvanathan (1992).

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Clements, K.W., Selvanathan, S. Understanding consumption patterns. Empirical Economics 19, 69–110 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01205729

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