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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.
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.
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).
The term E-utility for "experience utility" has been coined [2] to refer to the types of "hedonistic" utility like that of Bentham's greatest happiness principle. Since morality affects decisions, a VNM-rational agent's morals will affect the definition of its own utility function (see above).
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 modelling, it has been found to be violated in psychological experiments.
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
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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]