Folks, aside from the lab experiments (which I know produced mixed results), what empirical evidence do we have of the validity of the rational hypothesis? As best I can tell, the last work done in this regard were the nonparametric tests of WARP by Varian and Bronars in the 1980s.
Those studies, of course, were of aggregates of household consumption over long time periods. Has anybody tested the rational hypothesis against revealed preferences outside a laboratory by tracking individual consumer behavior?
The question comes to this: Is there a data set for a large population that tracks the time-series of acts of consumption for each individual in the population over some period of time?
If the rational hypothesis is applied to predict how individuals will behave, then it should be based on empirical data about individual behavior, should it not? Where is that data?
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