Talk:Utility

The content of Interpersonal comparisons of utility was merged into Utility on 25 September 2025. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. For the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

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Lower-case ‘j’ and ‘Υ’

u and υ are difficult to distinguish. - Patric 09:39, 6 Sep 2001 (UTC)

Are formulas correctly written??

I was wondering if the formulas are correctly written. In the section on Utility functions in game theory, there are statments like: the probability of u is α(u) and the probability of υ is (1 - α)(υ). Now the formula doesn't make sense. Some expert please cleanup that section. It is misnformation rather than information.

Karthik Iyer

Risk Aversion and CES

The statement that: "CES (constant elasticity of substitution) utility is one with constant relative risk aversion" is generally not correct. A utility function with constant elasticity of intertemporal substitution is one with constant relative risk aversion (of the form (c^(1-t))/(1-t)). However CES can also be (x^a+y^a)^(1/a) if you're talking about intratemporal choice among two (or more) goods.

Axioms incorrectly stated

In the section on "additive Von-Neumann Morgenstern expected utility" the independence axiom was incorrectly stated using equalities rather than preference relations. I fixed it. This section still needs a lot of work. It would be nice if someone would carefully review this section and perhaps post the axioms as stated in Mas-Colell et al, Kreps, or any other standard reference.

Merge proposal

There's a new page on Interpersonal comparisons of utility, unlinked from elsewhere, and which seems better merged here for context. Also, much of its contents revolve around 'utility is difficult to measure', which is already covered here. Klbrain (talk) 19:14, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support the merger. Thenightaway (talk) 19:16, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support. Note that Interpersonal comparisons of utility may be LLM-generated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elestrophe (talk • contribs) 06:31, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support the merger. JumperGiraffe (talk) 12:58, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Merge completed Klbrain (talk) 19:56, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fairly sure that (as @Elestrophe suggests) this section is LLM-generated. I have tagged it accordingly but I'm not familiar enough with the subject to know how accurate it is or whether it would be best just to remove it. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:03, 11 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]