On the geometry of luxury

No 2013-EP02, Economics Department Working Papers from Department of Economics, Parma University (Italy)

Abstract: A 2-parameter class of ordinal utility functions over a pair of goods is discussed with respect to general traits of preferences for luxury. The class contains Cobb-Douglas functions as no-luxury limit; its analytical tractability is probed by simple closed form solutions for Marshallian demand functions, expansion paths, Engel curves, income elasticity of demand, saturation levels, elasticity of substitution. Following Mantovi (2013), scale and substitution effects can be represented in terms of flows on bundle space; departure from homotheticity can thereby be represented by an index of luxury which measures the noncommutativity of such effects. On conceptual grounds, our index is intimately connected with Shephard’s distance. Decompositions of productive efficiency as tailored by Bogetoft et al. (2006) represent a natural setting for the application of our approach.

Keywords: Duality; homotheticity; Cobb-Douglas function; luxury; expansion path; elasticity of substitution; scale effect; substitution effect; income effect; Shephard’s distance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D81 E21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.swrwebeco.unipr.it/RePEc/pdf/I_2013-02.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:par:dipeco:2013-ep02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Department Working Papers from Department of Economics, Parma University (Italy) Via J.F. Kennedy 6, 43100 PARMA (Italy). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Lasagni ().