Nonparametric demand analysis of U.K. personal sector decisions on consumption, leisure and...

Abstract-This paper utilizes a new data set to test for utility maximizing behavior and weakly separable sub-utility functions in the context of a utility function comprising durables, nondurables, services, leisure, and monetary asset holdings for the UK personal sector. All the data sets analyzed demonstrated consistency with respect to utility maximizing behavior. The weak separability results prove to be relatively invariant to the degree of aggregation over goods but highly sensitive to the assumption made regarding the representative consumer. Per-household scaling of the data produced a utility function that is weakly separable in goods, services and leisure, and in monetary assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]