Investigation of Changes in Bread Consumers' Preferences in Urban Areas of Iran Using WARP and SARP Approaches

Investigating consumer behavior and rationalizing it in selecting different goods and services is important because it measures individuals chr('39')preferences over domestic or foreign goods and demonstrates the impact of impulses and policies as a structural failure or a change in individualschr('39') preferences. In other words, the validity of the assumption of rational consumer behavior is examined. The test of revealed preferences is a powerful way of examining changes in family preferences. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the stability and structural failure of urban consumer preferences for bread basket in the period 1996-1999 using strong and weak nonparametric test of revealed preferences in Iran. Initially, the weak preferences matrix revealed using average price data and the amount of bread types derived from household expenditure and income plan in urban areas and comparing consumer choices over different time periods. The results of the WARP matrix analysis show that there are no inconsistencies in the bread basket consumerschr('39') preferences. Due to the absence of violations in WARP, further changes in preferences using SARP were investigated. The results showed that rational behavior of bread consumers in urban households of Iran is rejected. Also, the results of K-W statistics indicate that there is a structural change in 2014 and indicate that there is no effect of transient shocks and structural failure in urban consumer preferences for bread. Given the years of failure of the utility function and the rationalization of consumer behavior and rational behavior, it is suggested to consider this in estimating the bread demand function of households.