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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.
Although there are at least four sources of uncertainty - the attribute outcomes, and a decisionmaker's fuzziness about: a) the specific shapes of the individual attribute utility functions, b) the aggregating constants' values, and c) whether the attribute utility functions are additive, these terms being addressed presently - uncertainty ...
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 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 function f is variously called an objective function, criterion function, loss function, cost function (minimization), [8] utility function or fitness function (maximization), or, in certain fields, an energy function or energy functional. A feasible solution that minimizes (or maximizes) the objective function is called an optimal solution.
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
In terms of real valued utility, one would say that the utility of Y and Z is infinitesimal compared with X, and the utility of Z is infinitesimal compared to Y. Thus, lexicographic preferences can be represented by utility functions returning nonstandard real numbers .
A social utility frontier (also called a grand utility frontier) can be obtained from the outer envelope of all these utility functions. Each point on a social utility frontier represents an efficient allocation of an economy's resources; that is, it is a Pareto optimum in factor allocation, in production, in consumption, and in the interaction ...