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Diminishing marginal utility is traditionally a microeconomic concept and often holds for an individual, although the marginal utility of a good or service might be increasing as well. For example, dosages of antibiotics, where having too few pills would leave bacteria with greater resistance, but a full supply could affect a cure.
Marginalism is a theory of economics that attempts to explain the discrepancy in the value of goods and services by reference to their secondary, or marginal, utility. It states that the reason why the price of diamonds is higher than that of water, for example, owes to the greater additional satisfaction of the diamonds over the water.
Marginal utility usually decreases with consumption of the good, the idea of "diminishing marginal utility". In calculus notation, the marginal utility of good X is =. When a good's marginal utility is positive, additional consumption of it increases utility; if zero, the consumer is satiated and indifferent about consuming more; if negative ...
Examples of perfect complements include left shoes compared to right shoes: the consumer is no better off having several right shoes if she has only one left shoe - additional right shoes have zero marginal utility without more left shoes, so bundles of goods differing only in the number of right shoes they include - however many - are equally ...
In other words, the marginal utility of each additional unit will decline. An example of this can be illustrated by a consumer who orders several coffees throughout the course of a day. The marginal utility experienced by the first coffee will be greater than the second. The marginal utility experienced by the second coffee will be greater than ...
Convex preferences with their associated convex indifference mapping arise from quasi-concave utility functions, although these are not necessary for the analysis of preferences. For example, Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) utility functions describe convex, homothetic preferences.
Lerner applied the concept of utility and its associated "law of marginal utility" to the distribution of income in society.The law of diminishing marginal utility implies that poorer people will gain more utility from money for additional spending than the wealthy.
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 ...