This note reviews consumers’ preference orderings in economics and shows that irrationality is a poor explanation for apparent violations of some axioms of order. Apparent violations seem to be better explained by the fact that consum-ers’ utility functions, if they exist at all, might not even belong to the class of quasi-concave functions. However, the main task of markets is the determination of equilibrium price vectors. The note shows in addition that, in Walrasian structures, quasi-concave utility functions are unnecessary for the determination of equilibrium price vectors.
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Paper provided by Economics and Econometrics Research Institute (EERI) in its series EERI Research Paper Series with number
EERI_RP_2008_10.
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