New Developments in Aggregation Economics
刻画了群体在市场环境中的加总行为，证明加总问题可分解为梯度之和，并探讨了群体有效行为的可检验性及从加总行为中恢复个体偏好等底层结构的可识别性条件。
The goal of this article is to provide a general characterization of the aggregate behavior of a group in a market environment. We allow for public and private consumption, intragroup production, and consumption externalities within a group; we only assume that the group always reaches Pareto-efficient decisions. We show that aggregation problems involve a simple mathematical structure: The aggregate demand of the group, considered as a vector field, can be decomposed into a sum of gradients. We briefly introduce exterior differential calculus as a tool to study this structure. We analyze two main issues. One is testability: What restrictions (if any) on the aggregate demand function characterize the efficient behavior of the group? The second issue relates to identifiability; we investigate the conditions under which it is possible to recover the underlying structure—namely, individual preferences, the decision process, and the resulting intragroup transfers—from the group's aggregate behavior.