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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]
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 ...
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.
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.
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 .
Isoelastic utility for different values of . When > the curve approaches the horizontal axis asymptotically from below with no lower bound.. In economics, the isoelastic function for utility, also known as the isoelastic utility function, or power utility function, is used to express utility in terms of consumption or some other economic variable that a decision-maker is concerned with.
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.
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 ...