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This category is for specific utility functions, properties or classes of utility functions. Pages in category "Utility function types" The following 43 pages are in this category, out of 43 total.
Most utility functions used for modeling or theory are well-behaved. They are usually monotonic and quasi-concave. However, it is possible for rational preferences not to be representable by a utility function. An example is lexicographic preferences which are not continuous and cannot be represented by a continuous utility function. [8]
A social utility frontier (also called a grand utility frontier) can be obtained from the outer envelope of all these utility functions. Each point on a social utility frontier represents an efficient allocation of an economy's resources; that is, it is a Pareto optimum in factor allocation, in production, in consumption, and in the interaction ...
A possible solution is to calculate n one-dimensional cardinal utility functions - one for each attribute. For example, suppose there are two attributes: apples and bananas (), both range between 0 and 99. Using VNM, we can calculate the following 1-dimensional utility functions:
A single-attribute utility function maps the amount of money a person has (or gains), to a number representing the subjective satisfaction he derives from it. The motivation to define a utility function comes from the St. Petersburg paradox: the observation that people are not willing to pay much for a lottery, even if its expected monetary gain is infinite.
Leontief utility functions represent complementary goods. For example: Suppose is the number of left shoes and the number of right shoes. A consumer can only use pairs of shoes. Hence, his utility is (,).
These functions are commonly used as examples in consumer theory. The functions are ordinal utility functions, which means that their properties are invariant under positive monotone transformation. For example, the Cobb–Douglas function could also be written as: + . Such functions only become interesting when there are two or more ...
The notion of social utility is analogous to the notion of a utility function in consumer choice. However, a social welfare function is different in that it is a mapping of individual utility functions onto a single output, in a way that accounts for the judgments of everyone in a society.