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someone just fixed the German language link, and it looks like a better article. Can anyone read German and perpahs make this one nicer?
Pdbailey (
talk)
06:20, 28 January 2008 (UTC)reply
Unexplained symbols
The article contains the following unexplained symbols:
Dp , Dw , p , u , and w ;
moreover, it is not clear over what domains i and j are supposed to range.
What is "the matrix" referred to, and what is meant by "a given element"? --
Lambiam10:31, 15 August 2008 (UTC)reply
This does not clear up things for me. I still have no idea what i ranges over. Years since 1970? Volume indices of La Comédie humaine? Number of grocery stores in a 50-mile radius? If I see the notation "x(p, w)" it means to me: some function x applied to a pair of arguments p and w, so then x is a function. When you say that x is a vector, do you mean a vector-valued function? The article
Hicksian demand function, which is as incomprehensible as this one (what is the min being taken over? what does it mean that u has an overbar in the defn. but not in the applications? how do x and the function u(x) enter the defn.?) does not suggest or explain how the result is a vector. How does one compare two vectors for being minimal?
If I understand you correctly, some abbreviations are used in the article that are not explained, and w is actually a function of two arguments, the second of which (u) is itself a function taking two arguments, the second of which is itself a function ... (and so on). So if you write out the types of these functions, you get an infinite expansion of the form
Lambiam, these articles are stubs, and neither I nor any other economics editor with the time appears interested in fixing that. Are you? If so, perhaps I and (knock on wood) others will help you with bringing them from their current state (as articles for any by economics Ph.D. students) to something recognizable to someone who has not done the first year of an economics Ph.D. program.
To answer your specific questions, x is a vector, an observable. In these treatments, it is also a function, and yes, it is a vector-valued function. If you want to know what the range of x and h are, read either the respective article's lead. As far as you infinite expansion, only expand it once, you have to choose what is the endogenous/dependent variables, and what is the exogenous/independent variable, you can choose between u and w, and p must be independent in these formulations. But the baseline is to put both u and w not as functions and assume that the reader will know to expand exactly one of them.
I'm generally loathe to do more than minor touch-ups on articles, unless I understand the subject matter and have reliable sources to back me up. In this case, these articles are total gobbledygook to me. Usually I have no problem in understanding at least the mathematical formulas, but here it is all as clear to me as abracadabra. --
Lambiam20:15, 24 August 2008 (UTC)reply
the text: "The above equation is also known as the Hicksian decomposition of demand. The left hand side of the equation represents how demand for one good changes in response to price changes for another good. The right hand side of the equation says that this change is equal to the change in demand holding expenditure fixed at w* plus the change in demand when income changes multiplied by how much income has to change to keep utility constant." has come pretty much straight out of the book by varian, but in varian it is referring to a different equation than the one given on the wikipedia page.
this confused me for a good 10 minutes, until i looked up the reference.