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Contents Introduction

We introduce a new approach to testing the diversity of unobservable consumer preferences in cross-section data. The approach is applied to three international cross-sections with Asian, European and North American countries for a large number of goods and services at three levels of aggregation. At the most aggregated level of consumption, the study found mostly insignificant differences across countries in consumer preferences. On the other hand, at the least disaggregated level we identified a number of commodities with highly unusual national consumption patterns. However, the latter commodities represented a small portion of analyzed commodities, indicating that consumer preferences are broadly comparable across countries.