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In microeconomics, the expenditure minimization problem is the dual of the utility maximization problem: "how much money do I need to reach a certain level of happiness?". This question comes in two parts. Given a consumer's utility function, prices, and a utility target, how much money would the consumer need?
When faced with several alternatives, the person will choose the alternative with the highest utility. The utility function is not visible; however, by observing the choices made by the person, we can "reverse-engineer" his utility function. This is the goal of revealed preference theory. [citation needed] In practice, however, people are not ...
Gossen's First Law is the "law" of diminishing marginal utility: that marginal utilities are diminishing across the ranges relevant to decision-making. Gossen's Second Law , which presumes that utility is at least weakly quantified, is that in equilibrium an agent will allocate expenditures so that the ratio of marginal utility to price ...
There remain economists who believe that utility, if it cannot be measured, at least can be approximated somewhat to provide some form of measurement, similar to how prices, which have no uniform unit to provide an actual price level, could still be indexed to provide an "inflation rate" (which is actually a level of change in the prices of ...
In expenditure minimisation the utility level is given and well as the prices of goods, the role of the consumer is to find a minimum level of expenditure required to reach this utility level. The utilitarian social choice rule is a rule that says that society should choose the alternative that maximizes the sum of utilities.
Menger advanced his theory that the marginal utility of goods, rather than labor inputs, is the source of their value. This marginalist theory solved the diamond-water paradox that had been puzzling classical economists: the fact that mankind finds diamonds to be far more valuable than water although water is far more important.
The equivalent variation is the change in wealth, at current prices, that would have the same effect on consumer welfare as would the change in prices, with income unchanged. It is a useful tool when the present prices are the best place to make a comparison.
The aggregation problem is the difficult problem of finding a valid way to treat an empirical or theoretical aggregate as if it reacted like a less-aggregated measure, say, about behavior of an individual agent as described in general microeconomic theory [1] (see representative agent and heterogeneity in economics).