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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.
Utility functions can be derived from the points on a contract curve. Numerous utility functions can be derived, one for each point on the production possibility frontier (PQ in the diagram above). A social utility frontier (also called a grand utility frontier) can be obtained from the outer envelope of all these utility functions. Each point ...
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]
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).
A utility function is considered to be measurable, if the strength of preference or intensity of liking of a good or service is determined with precision by the use of some objective criteria. For example, suppose that eating an apple gives to a person exactly half the pleasure of that of eating an orange.
For every utility function v, there is a unique preference relation represented by v. However, the opposite is not true: a preference relation may be represented by many different utility functions. The same preferences could be expressed as any utility function that is a monotonically increasing transformation of v. E.g., if
An example of how indifference curves are obtained as the level curves of a utility function. A graph of indifference curves for several utility levels of an individual consumer is called an indifference map. Points yielding different utility levels are each associated with distinct indifference curves and these indifference curves on the ...
A multi-utility representation (MUR) of a relation is a set U of utility functions, such that : (). In other words, A is preferred to B if and only if all utility functions in the set U unanimously hold this preference. The concept was introduced by Efe Ok.