COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS
AT YALE UNIVERSITY

Box 208281
New Haven, CT 06520-8281

COWLES FOUNDATION DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 830

"Semiparametric Estimation of Monotonic and Concave Utility Functions:
The Discrete Choice Case"

Rosa L. Matzkin

April 1987

This paper develops a semiparametric method for estimating the nonrandom part V(.) of a random utility function U(v, omega) - V(v) + e(omega) from data on discrete choice behavior. Here v and omega are, respectively, vectors of observable and unobservable attributes of an alternative, and e(omega) is the random part of the utility for that alternative. The method is semiparametric because it assumes that the distribution of the random parts is know up to a finite-dimensional parameter theta, while not requiring specification of a parametric form for V( ).

JEL Classification: 211, 212, 022

Keywords: Discrete choice models, nonparametric estimation, utility functions, consistency, semiparametric estimation