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This paper presents a unifying approach to modelling endogenous tastes. Tastes are defined as orderings of a subspace of a (suitable chosen) commodity space. Using this definition endogenous tastes are analytically similar to externalities. Accordingly, many models in economic theory can be interpreted as dealing with endogenous tastes.

The paper presents an algorithm that solvestwo-point boundary-value problems that arise in economic control models incontinuous time with an infinite time horizon and several state variables.The algorithm can determine optimal trajectories that converge to anisolated equilibrium point. It therefore provides a numerical solution toa large class of problems for which no solvers were yet available.