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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.
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 ...
A major theme of science fiction and of speculative biology is to convey a message of optimism or pessimism according to the author's worldview. [5] [6] Whereas optimistic visions of technological progress are common enough in hard science fiction, pessimistic views of the future of humanity are far more usual in fiction based on biology. [4]
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.
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 .
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.
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.