Leandro Gorno (Getulio Vargas Foundation)

“Revealed preference and identification”

abstract

I develop a theory of revealed preference based on the assumption that we observe some optimal choices rather than all of them, as is traditionally assumed. I establish sufficient conditions to uniquely recover preferences from behavioral data for three standard cases: ordinal continuous preferences, von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences and qualitative probabilities. In spite of the relaxed observational requirements, the conditions turn out to be surprisingly weak.