As there is a plethora of demand models, which one should be used to estima
te income and price elasticities? The paper sheds light on this important p
ractical problem by developing a matrix approach to simulating (MAS) demand
equations to analyse their performance under idealized circumstances. Arti
ficial data on the dependent variable are generated by one model, and these
are then used for the estimation of another model. As an illustrative appl
ication, using four popular models, a 4 x 4 matrix is generated which gives
all pair-wise comparisons. The performance of the models is then evaluated
on the basis of the quality of the income and own-price elasticity estimat
es.