Other Recent Work

The Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics was founded in 1930 from a grant made by the Bancitaly Corporation to the University of California in tribute to its organizer and past president, Amadeo Peter Giannini of San Francisco. Members and associate members of the Giannini Foundation are University of California faculty and Cooperative Extension specialists in agricultural and resource economics on the Berkeley, Davis and Riverside campuses. The broad mission of the Foundation is to promote and support research and outreach activites in agricultural economics and rural development relevant to California.

Giannini Reporter, Volume 21

(2009)

The Giannini Reporter is a biennial publication that provides information on the ongoing research of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics, the extension of that research, and other related activities.

A Recurrent Utility Function of Fictitious Generality

(1999)

For the past twenty-five years, Dusansky and his associated co-authors have published a long series of papers which are based on the same price-dependent utility function. The alleged price dependence, however, is fictitious in the sense that the level of exogenous money income can replace the commodity prices. The consequence is that the demand functions derived from Dusansky’s utility function are identical and observationally equivalent to the demand functions obtained from a prototypical utility function. Since all the market and environmental effects are revealed only through the demand functions, the specification and use of a utility function such as that used by Dusansky is irrelevant and uninformative for the analysis of any economic problem where prices enter the consumer utility function and whose goal is the detection of the effects of price-dependent preferences on the demand for real goods.