A General Revealed Preference Test for Quasilinear Preferences: Theory and Experiments
General Economics
2025-03-19 v2 Economics
Abstract
We provide a generalized revealed preference test for quasilinear preferences. The test applies to nonlinear budget sets and non-convex preferences as those found in taxation and nonlinear pricing contexts. We study the prevalence of quasilinear preferences in a laboratory real-effort task experiment with nonlinear wages. The experiment demonstrates the empirical relevance of our test. We find support for either convex (non-separable) preferences or quasilinear preferences but weak support for the hypothesis of both quasilinear and convex preferences.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2111.01248,
title = {A General Revealed Preference Test for Quasilinear Preferences: Theory and Experiments},
author = {Mikhail Freer and Marco Castillo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.01248},
year = {2025}
}