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Standard utility functions represent ordinal preferences. The expected utility hypothesis imposes limitations on the utility function and makes utility cardinal (though still not comparable across individuals). Although the expected utility hypothesis is standard in economic modeling, it is violated in psychological experiments.
The strongest independence property is called additive independence.Two attributes, 1 and 2, are called additive independent, if the preference between two lotteries (defined as joint probability distributions on the two attributes) depends only on their marginal probability distributions (the marginal PD on attribute 1 and the marginal PD on attribute 2).
In decision theory, subjective expected utility is the attractiveness of an economic opportunity as perceived by a decision-maker in the presence of risk.Characterizing the behavior of decision-makers as using subjective expected utility was promoted and axiomatized by L. J. Savage in 1954 [1] [2] following previous work by Ramsey and von Neumann. [3]
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.
The Becker–DeGroot–Marschak method (BDM), named after Gordon M. Becker, Morris H. DeGroot and Jacob Marschak for the 1964 Behavioral Science paper, "Measuring Utility by a Single-Response Sequential Method" is an incentive-compatible procedure used in experimental economics to measure willingness to pay (WTP).
The term E-utility for "experience utility" has been coined [2] to refer to the types of "hedonistic" utility like that of Bentham's greatest happiness principle. Since morality affects decisions, a VNM-rational agent's morals will affect the definition of its own utility function (see above).
With ordinal utility, a person's preferences do not have a unique marginal utility, making the concept of diminishing marginal utility irrelevant. On the other hand, diminishing marginal utility is a significant concept in cardinal utility , which is used to analyse intertemporal choice , choice under uncertainty , and social welfare in modern ...
In economics, a cardinal utility expresses not only which of two outcomes is preferred, but also the intensity of preferences, i.e. how much better or worse one outcome is compared to another. [ 1 ] In consumer choice theory , economists originally attempted to replace cardinal utility with the apparently weaker concept of ordinal utility .