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What is a commodity? Two axiomatic answers

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Summary.

We identify conditions under which preferences over subsets of a consumption world can be reduced to preferences over bundles of "commodities". We distinguish ordinal bundles, whose coordinates are defined up to monotone transformations, from cardinal bundles, whose coordinates are defined up to positive linear transformations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de Sciences Economiques and CIREQ, Université de Montréal, rue Jean-Brillant, H3C 3J7, Montréal, CANADA

    Yves Sprumont

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  1. Yves Sprumont
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Correspondence to Yves Sprumont.

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Received: 27 March 2002, Revised: 17 March 2003,

JEL Classification Numbers:

D11.

I am grateful to S. Barberá, C. Chambers, K. Nehring, and O. Sprumont for stimulating conversations and useful remarks. I also thank a referee for helpful comments, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for support.

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Sprumont, Y. What is a commodity? Two axiomatic answers. Economic Theory 23, 429–437 (2004) (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-003-0379-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-003-0379-y

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