Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 3, 2026

An Inexpensive Adaptation of a Commercial Microwave Reactor for Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis
Published on: November 22, 2024
Gorman revisited: nonparametric conditions for exact linear aggregation
Laurens Cherchye1, Ian Crawford2, Bram De Rock3
1Center for Economic Studies, University of Leuven, E. Sabbelaan 53, 8500 Kortrijk, Belgium.
Abstract:
In the tradition of Afriat (Int Econ Rev 8:67-77, 1967), Diewert (Rev Econ Stud 40:419-425, 1973) and Varian (Econometrica 50:945-972, 1982), we provide a revealed preference characterisation of exact linear aggregation. This guarantees that aggregate demand can be written as a function of prices and aggregate income alone, while abstracting from income-distributional aspects. We also establish nonparametric conditions for individual consumption to be representable in terms of Gorman Polar Form preferences. Our results are simple and complement those of Gorman (1953, 1961). We illustrate the practical usefulness of our results by means of an empirical application to a Spanish balanced microdata panel. We find strong evidence against the existence of a limited set of representative agents, which in turn seems to empirically support the need for (macroeconomic) models using a continuum of heterogeneous agents.
Related Concept Videos
One-Way ANOVA
One-Way ANOVA: Equal Sample Sizes
Different sample means can result in different values for the variance estimate: variance between samples. This is because the variance between samples is calculated as the product of the sample size and the variance between the...
Introduction to Nonparametric Statistics
One of...
Ranks
Quantifying and Rejecting Outliers: The Grubbs Test
Friedman Two-way Analysis of Variance by Ranks