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A consumer's indirect utility (,) can be computed from their utility function (), defined over vectors of quantities of consumable goods, by first computing the most preferred affordable bundle, represented by the vector (,) by solving the utility maximization problem, and second, computing the utility ((,)) the consumer derives from that ...
Inverting this formula gives the indirect utility function (utility as a function of price and income): (,) = (),where is the amount of income available to the individual and is equivalent to the expenditure ((,)) in the previous equation.
Roy's identity reformulates Shephard's lemma in order to get a Marshallian demand function for an individual and a good from some indirect utility function.. The first step is to consider the trivial identity obtained by substituting the expenditure function for wealth or income in the indirect utility function (,), at a utility of :
where each term is a linear transformation + of a utility function. These results can be generalized to any number of attributes. Given attributes 1,...,n, if any subset of the attributes is utility-independent of its complement, then the n-attribute utility function is multi-linear and has one of the following forms:
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.
Isoelastic utility for different values of . When > the curve approaches the horizontal axis asymptotically from below with no lower bound.. In economics, the isoelastic function for utility, also known as the isoelastic utility function, or power utility function, is used to express utility in terms of consumption or some other economic variable that a decision-maker is concerned with.
In economics, Epstein–Zin preferences refers to a specification of recursive utility. A recursive utility function can be constructed from two components,: a time aggregator that characterizes preferences in the absence of uncertainty and a risk aggregator that defines the certainty equivalent function that characterizes preferences over static gambles and is used to aggregate the risk ...
An additive utility function is characteristic of independent goods. For example, an apple and a hat are considered independent: the utility a person receives from having an apple is the same whether or not he has a hat, and vice versa. A typical utility function for this case is given at the right.