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Gossen's Laws
Gossen's laws, named for Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810–1858), are three laws of economics: * Gossen's First Law is the "law" of diminishing marginal utility: that marginal utilities are diminishing across the ranges relevant to decision-making. * Gossen's Second Law, which presumes that utility is at least weakly quantified, is that in equilibrium an agent will allocate expenditures so that the ratio of marginal utility to price (marginal cost of acquisition) is equal across all goods and services. :\frac=\frac\,\forall\left(i,j\right) :where :* U is utility :* x_i is quantity of the i-th good or service :* p_i is the price of the i-th good or service * Gossen's Third Law is that scarcity In economics, scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good. ... is a precondition for economic value. Se ...
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Hermann Heinrich Gossen
Hermann Heinrich Gossen (7 September 1810 – 13 February 1858) was a Prussian economist who is often regarded as the first to elaborate a general theory of marginal utility. Life and work Gossen studied in Bonn, then worked in the Prussian administration until retiring in 1847, after which he sold insurance until his death. Prior to Gossen, a number of theorists, including Gabriel Cramer, Daniel Bernoulli, William Forster Lloyd, Nassau William Senior, and Jules Dupuit had employed or asserted the significance of some notion of marginal utility. But Cramer, Bernoulli, and Dupuit had focussed upon specific problems, Lloyd had not presented any application, and if Senior actually employed to the development of more general theory then he did so in language that caused the application to be missed by most readers. Gossen's book ''Die Entwickelung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs, und der daraus fließenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln'' (''The Development of the Laws of Hu ...
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Law Of Diminishing Marginal Utility
In economics, utility is the satisfaction or benefit derived by consuming a product. The marginal utility of a good or service describes how much pleasure or satisfaction is gained by consumers as a result of the increase or decrease in consumption by one unit. There are three types of marginal utility. They are positive, negative, or zero marginal utility. For instance, you like eating pizza, the second piece of pizza brings you more satisfaction than only eating one piece of pizza. It means your marginal utility from purchasing pizza is positive. However, after eating the second piece you feel full, and you would not feel any better from eating the third piece. This means your marginal utility from eating pizza is zero. Moreover, you might feel sick if you eat more than three pieces of pizza. At this time, your marginal utility is negative. In other words, a negative marginal utility indicates that every unit of goods or service consumed will do more harm than good, which will le ...
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Marginal Utility
In economics, utility is the satisfaction or benefit derived by consuming a product. The marginal utility of a Goods (economics), good or Service (economics), service describes how much pleasure or satisfaction is gained by consumers as a result of the increase or decrease in Consumption (economics), consumption by one unit. There are three types of marginal utility. They are positive, negative, or zero marginal utility. For instance, you like eating pizza, the second piece of pizza brings you more satisfaction than only eating one piece of pizza. It means your marginal utility from purchasing pizza is positive. However, after eating the second piece you feel full, and you would not feel any better from eating the third piece. This means your marginal utility from eating pizza is zero. Moreover, you might feel sick if you eat more than three pieces of pizza. At this time, your marginal utility is negative. In other words, a negative marginal utility indicates that every unit of good ...
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Gossen's Second Law
Gossen's Second “Law”, named for Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810–1858), is the assertion that an economic agent will allocate his or her expenditures such that the ratio of the marginal utility of each good or service to its price (the marginal expenditure necessary for its acquisition) is equal to that for every other good or service. Formally, :\frac=\frac~\forall\left(i,j\right) where * U is utility * x_i is quantity of the i-th good or service * p_i is the price of the i-th good or service Informal derivation Imagine that an agent has spent money on various sorts of goods or services. If the last unit of currency spent on goods or services of one sort bought a quantity with ''less'' marginal utility than that which would have been associated with the quantity of another sort that could have been bought with the money, then the agent would have been ''better off'' instead buying more of that other good or service. Assuming that goods and services are continuously divisi ...
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Utility
As a topic of economics, utility is used to model worth or value. Its usage has evolved significantly over time. The term was introduced initially as a measure of pleasure or happiness as part of the theory of utilitarianism by moral philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The term has been adapted and reapplied within neoclassical economics, which dominates modern economic theory, as a utility function that represents a single consumer's preference ordering over a choice set but is not comparable across consumers. This concept of utility is personal and based on choice rather than on pleasure received, and so is specified more rigorously than the original concept but makes it less useful (and controversial) for ethical decisions. Utility function Consider a set of alternatives among which a person can make a preference ordering. The utility obtained from these alternatives is an unknown function of the utilities obtained from each alternative, not the sum of ...
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Good (economics)
In economics, goods are items that satisfy human wants and provide utility, for example, to a consumer making a purchase of a satisfying Product (business), product. A common distinction is made between goods which are transferable, and Service (economics), services, which are not transferable. A good is an "economic good" if it is useful to people but scarcity, scarce in relation to its demand so that human effort is required to obtain it.Samuelson, P. Anthony., Samuelson, W. (1980). Economics. 11th ed. / New York: McGraw-Hill. In contrast, free goods, such as air, are naturally in abundant supply and need no conscious effort to obtain them. Private goods are things owned by people, such as Television, televisions, living room furniture, wallets, cellular telephones, almost anything owned or used on a daily basis that is not food-related. A consumer good or "final good" is any item that is ultimately consumed, rather than used in the production of another good. For example, ...
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Service (economics)
A service is an "(intangible) act or use for which a consumer, firm, or government is willing to pay." Examples include work done by barbers, doctors, lawyers, mechanics, banks, insurance companies, and so on. Public services are those that society (nation state, fiscal union or region) as a whole pays for. Using resources, skill, ingenuity, and experience, service providers benefit service consumers. Services may be defined as intangible acts or performances whereby the service provider provides value to the customer. Key characteristics Services have three key characteristics: Intangibility Services are by definition intangible. They are not manufactured, transported or stocked. One cannot store services for future use. They are produced and consumed simultaneously. Perishability Services are perishable in two regards: * Service-relevant resources, processes, and systems are assigned for service delivery during a specific period in time. If the service consumer does not ...
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Scarcity
In economics, scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good."Samuelson, P. Anthony., Samuelson, W. (1980). Economics. 11th ed. / New York: McGraw-Hill. If the conditions of scarcity didn't exist and an "infinite amount of every good could be produced or human wants fully satisfied ... there would be no economic goods, i.e. goods that are relatively scarce..." Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market or by the commons. Scarcity also includes an individual's lack of resources to buy commodities. The opposite of scarcity is abundance. Scarcity plays a key role in economic theory, and it is essential for a "proper definition of economics itself."Montani G. (1987) Scarcity. In: Palgrave Macmillan (eds) ''The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics''. Palgrav ...
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Marginalism
Marginalism is a theory of economics that attempts to explain the discrepancy in the value of goods and services by reference to their secondary, or marginal, utility. It states that the reason why the price of diamonds is higher than that of water, for example, owes to the greater additional satisfaction of the diamonds over the water. Thus, while the water has greater total utility, the diamond has greater marginal utility. Although the central concept of marginalism is that of marginal utility, marginalists, following the lead of Alfred Marshall, drew upon the idea of marginal physical productivity in explanation of cost. The neoclassical tradition that emerged from British marginalism abandoned the concept of utility and gave marginal rates of substitution a more fundamental role in analysis. Marginalism is an integral part of mainstream economic theory. Important marginal concepts Marginality For issues of marginality, constraints are conceptualized as a ''border'' ...
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Marginal Concepts
In economics, marginal concepts are associated with a ''specific change'' in the quantity used of a good or service, as opposed to some notion of the over-all significance of that class of good or service, or of some total quantity thereof.{{citation needed, date=February 2012 Marginality Constraints are conceptualized as a ''border'' or ''margin''. Wicksteed, Philip Henry; ''The Common Sense of Political Economy'' (1910), Bk I Ch 2 and elsewhere. The location of the margin for any individual corresponds to his or her ''endowment'', broadly conceived to include opportunities. This endowment is determined by many things including physical laws (which constrain how forms of energy and matter may be transformed), accidents of nature (which determine the presence of natural resources), and the outcomes of past decisions made both by others and by the individual himself or herself. A value that holds true given particular constraints is a ''marginal'' value. A change that would b ...
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