Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In economics, utility is a measure of a certain person's satisfaction from a certain state of the world. Over time, the term has been used with at least two meanings. In a normative context, utility refers to a goal or objective that we wish to maximize, i.e., an objective function.
A submodular utility function is characteristic of substitute goods. For example, an apple and a bread loaf can be considered substitutes: the utility a person receives from eating an apple is smaller if he has already ate bread (and vice versa), since he is less hungry in that case. A typical utility function for this case is given at the right.
This means that the utility that consumers assign to a commodity will always be exactly proportional to the amount of the commodity offered; for example, one million oranges would be valued exactly one million times more than one orange.
E.g., the commodity is a heterogeneous resource, such as land. Then, the utility functions are not functions of a finite number of variables, but rather set functions defined on Borel subsets of the land. The natural generalization of a linear utility function to that model is an additive set function.
In economics, the Debreu's theorems are preference representation theorems—statements about the representation of a preference ordering by a real-valued utility function. The theorems were proved by Gerard Debreu during the 1950s.
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 .
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 ...
In economics, a random utility model (RUM), [1] [2] also called stochastic utility model, [3] is a mathematical description of the preferences of a person, whose choices are not deterministic, but depend on a random state variable.