| Sumario: | The article presents the authors' reply to comments made by Tapan Biswas on their article "Optimal Growth with Intertemporally Dependent Preferences." Biswas has raised three criticisms of the definition of intertemporal complementarity used in their paper: (1) it does not compensate for the income effect, (2) it is not a symmetric relationship and (3) complementarity between c(t) and c(t) depends on the choice of t. His observations are all quite correct. It does not follow, however, that the concept is "totally meaningless". Indeed, the authors believe that, with all its difficulties, it is more meaningful than the Edgeworth-Pareto concept to which Biswas proposes to return. The authors are hesitant to define "substitutes" as the opposite of complements - in this sense, although Biswas has attributed such a definition to them. One reason for this unnoticed reticence is that" substitutes "seems too well established in the Hicksian sense as the normal case: it is well known that if all goods are independent, all pairs of goods are Hicksian "substitutes."
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