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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.
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 .
Examples of alternatives to utility maximisation due to bounded rationality are; satisficing, elimination by aspects and the mental accounting heuristic. The satisficing heuristic is when a consumer defines an aspiration level and looks until they find an option that satisfies this, they will deem this option good enough and stop looking.
For example, if R prefers (2, 2, 4) to (1, 3, 4), it also prefers (2, 2, 9) to (1, 3, 9); the utility of agent 3 should not affect the comparison between two utility profiles of agents 1 and 2. This property can also be called locality or separability .
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 ...
In economics, an ordinal utility function is a function representing the preferences of an agent on an ordinal scale. Ordinal utility theory claims that it is only meaningful to ask which option is better than the other, but it is meaningless to ask how much better it is or how good it is.
In economics, a utility representation theorem shows that, under certain conditions, a preference ordering can be represented by a real-valued utility function, such that option A is preferred to option B if and only if the utility of A is larger than that of B.