TITLE:
Another Look at Becker’s Irrational Consumer
AUTHORS:
Richard M. Peck
KEYWORDS:
Irrational Consumer; WARP; Downward Sloping Demand
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.2 No.3,
August
2,
2012
ABSTRACT: Becker’s paper "Irrational Consumers and Economic Theory" ([1]) is a classic. This paper shows how to parameterize the process of selecting points randomly on a budget set. This parameterization also simplifies the proof that average demand curves are downward sloping and satisfy the weak axiom of revealed preference. In addition, we show that the probability distribution of random choices does not need to be restricted to a uniform distribution which Becker assumes. In fact, the distribution can be arbitrary.