Abstract
Most economists ‘accept unquestioningly the consumer’s judgement of what is best for him, his tastes as the outcome of that judgement, and his market behaviour as the reflection of his tastes’.2 The basis of this view is the traditional theory of demand, particularly its revealed preference variant, which assumes that the consumer is always in equilibrium, maximising satisfaction from the goods that he purchases. Not surprisingly, therefore, economists have paid little or no attention to the ‘quality’ of decision-making by consumers. There is a vast literature on production efficiency; almost none on consumption efficiency. Recently, however, demand theory has produced a new approach which does permit analysis of this question.
At the time this work was being completed the author was Research Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford; he is presently working with the ILO, Geneva.
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Notes
T. Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction (Oxford University Press, 1976) pp. 4–5.
These are summarised in M. D. Vernon, The Psychology of Perception (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962).
Formally, the requirement of perfect divisibility is that if x = (a, b) and x′ = (a′, b′) are any two attainable vectors of quantities of characteristics, then any vector kx + (l − k)x′ also be attainable (with o ⩽ k ⩽ l). See H. A. John Green, Consumer Theory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World (London: Paladin, 1974) p. 156.
F. Stewart, Technology and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1977).
For a full description of the survey design and the respondent profile see the first appendix in Jeffrey James, Product Choice and Poverty: A Study of the Inefficiency of Low-income Consumption and the Distributional Impact of Product Changes (Geneva: ILO, 1980; mimeographed World Employment Programme research working paper; restricted).
For an excellent introduction see J. B. Kruskal and M. Wish, Multidimensional Scaling (London: Sage, 1978). Other references are to be found in James, Product Choice and Poverty, p. 46.
See, for example, P. E. Green and V. R. Rao, Applied Multidimensional Scaling: A Comparison of Approach and Algorithms (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972). See also the discussion and references in James, Product Choice and Poverty, pp. 48–52 and Appendix 5.
G. S. Dann (ed.), Everyday Life in Barbados: A Sociological Perspective (Leiden: Department of Caribbean Studies of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, 1976) p. 35.
David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 120.
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© 1984 International Labour Organisation
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James, J. (1984). Technology, Products and Income Distribution: The Soap Market in Barbados. In: van Ginneken, W., Baron, C. (eds) Appropriate Products, Employment and Technology. ILO Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06824-1_7
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