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Utility

In economics, utility is a measure of satisfaction, referring to the total satisfaction received by a consumer from consuming a good or service. Given this measure, one may speak meaningfully of increasing or decreasing utility, and thereby explain economic behavior in terms of attempts to increase one's utility. Utility is often modeled to be affected by consumption of various goods and services, possession of wealth and spending of leisure time.

The doctrine of utilitarianism saw the maximization of utility as a moral criterion for the organization of society. According to utilitarians, such as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), society should aim to maximize the total utility of individuals, aiming for "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people". Another theory forwarded by John Rawls (1921–2002) would have society maximize the utility of those with the lowest utility, raising them up to create a more equitable distribution across society.

Utility is usually applied by economists in such constructs as the indifference curve, which plot the combination of commodities that an individual or a society would accept to maintain a given level of satisfaction. Individual utility and social utility can be construed as the value of a utility function and a social welfare function respectively. When coupled with production or commodity constraints, under some assumptions, these functions can be used to analyze Pareto efficiency, such as illustrated by Edgeworth boxes in contract curves. Such efficiency is a central concept in welfare economics.

In finance, utility is applied to generate an individual's price for an asset called the indifference price. Utility functions are also related to risk measures, with the most common example being the entropic risk measure.

From Wikipedia under the GNU Free Documentation License
Thu Feb 2 02:30:16 2012

Noun

utility (plural utilities)

  1. The state or condition of being useful; usefulness.
  2. Something that is useful.
  3. (economics) The ability of a commodity to satisfy needs or wants; the satisfaction experienced by the consumer of that commodity.
  4. (business, finance) A service provider, such as an electric company or water company or its securities.
  5. (computing) A software program specifically designed to help manage and tune the computer hardware, operating system or application software, and perform a single task or a small range of tasks; as opposed to application software which tends to be software suites.
    I've bought a new disk utility that can recover deleted files.
  6. (sports) The ability to play multiple positions.
Synonyms

From Wiktionary under the GNU Free Documentation License
Fri May 4 10:38:26 2012


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In some cases, criminal behavior can also be an act of rudeness. Contents. 1 Relationship to morality; 2 Cultural differences; 3 Utility; 4 Examples. 4.1 Speech
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