| Sumario: | Our exploration was directed at short-run demand, so far a rather neglected aspect of consumer's behavior instead of the traditional hypothesis which involves the assumption that market demand arises as the aggregate of individual demand curves, we based our research on the promising idea conceived by J. Stoetzel and further developed by Daniel Adam, according to which the typical consumer enters the market with a price bracket in mind, and this is what gives rise to the phenomenon of the market demand curve. Having acknowledged our debt to the French pioneers in this field, we feel obliged to add that the results of our survey cast doubt on some of the propositions forwarded by Adam. Thus, for example, we have found no support for the hypothesis according to which the standard deviations of the limit distributions are the same for different products. We had to refrain from using the French data, partly because they were published in coarsely grouped form only, and partly because they seem to have been derived from quota samples, which means that statistical tests of significance could not legitimately be applied to them. Much more important than the negative conclusions are the positive indications of our results, discussed in detail in Sections IV to VIII. Here we shall reiterate only some of the main points, the first of which is that the concept of the limits is realistic and an effective tool of research into consumer's behavior. Next comes the confirmation of the hypothesis concerning the approximately logarithmic nature of the subjective price scale and the tracing of local distortions in the neighborhood of certain prices. This last point is one to which Adam has given considerable attention. He has even developed an ingenious variant of the Thurstone-Edwards method of scale construction and has demonstrated how it can be applied to his data. The reason why we have not followed his lead was simply that we could find no justification...
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