Differentiability Properties of a Parametric Consumer Problem

Abstract

We study the budget map and the indirect utility function of a parametric consumer problem in a Banach space setting by some advanced tools from set-valued and variational analysis. The Lipschitz-likeness and differentiability properties of the budget map, as well as formulas for finding subdifferentials of the infimal nuisance function, which is obtained from the indirect utility function by changing its sign, are established. Our investigation is mainly based on the paper by Mordukhovich [J. Global Optim. 28 (2004), 347--362] on coderivative analysis of variational systems and the paper of Mordukhovich, Nam, and Yen [Math. Program. 116 (2009), 369--396] on subgradients of marginal functions. Economic meanings of the obtained subdifferential estimates are explained in details.