This brief note was extracted from notes handwritten in August 1975 to facilitate a project on ’Hedonic Housing’ with Richard Blundell that, in the event, did not proceed. It is included because it is the culmination of one line of thought about the budgeting problem, and because pseudo-separability, or ’implicit separability’ as it is sometimes called, has now cropped up in a number of different problems.
Keywords: budgeting, implicit separability, pseudo-separability