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Utility Theory
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes what's viewed as basic elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyzes the economy as a system where production, consumption, saving, and investment interact, and factors affecting it: employment of the resources of labour, capital, and land, currency inflation, economic growth, and public policies that have impact on these elements. Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics, describing "what is", and normative economics, advocating "what ought to be"; between economic theory and applied economics; between ratio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edgeworth Box
In economics, an Edgeworth box, sometimes referred to as an Edgeworth-Bowley box, is a graphical representation of a market with just two commodities, ''X'' and ''Y'', and two consumers. The dimensions of the box are the total quantities Ω''x'' and Ω''y'' of the two goods. Let the consumers be Octavio and Abby. The top right-hand corner of the box represents the allocation in which Octavio holds all the goods, while the bottom left corresponds to complete ownership by Abby. Points within the box represent ways of allocating the goods between the two consumers. Market behaviour will be determined by the consumers' indifference curves. The blue curves in the diagram represent indifference curves for Octavio, and are shown as convex from his viewpoint (i.e. seen from the bottom left). The orange curves apply to Abby, and are convex as seen from the top right. Moving up and to the right increases Octavio's allocation and puts him onto a more desirable indifference curve while placing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Samuelson
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory". "In a career that spanned seven decades, he transformed his field, influenced millions of students and turned MIT into an economics powerhouse" Economic historian Randall E. Parker has called him the "Father of Modern Economics", and ''The New York Times'' considers him to be the "foremost academic economist of the 20th century". Samuelson was likely the most influential economist of the latter half of the 20th century."Paul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Function (mathematics)
In mathematics, a function from a set to a set assigns to each element of exactly one element of .; the words map, mapping, transformation, correspondence, and operator are often used synonymously. The set is called the domain of the function and the set is called the codomain of the function.Codomain ''Encyclopedia of Mathematics'Codomain. ''Encyclopedia of Mathematics''/ref> The earliest known approach to the notion of function can be traced back to works of Persian mathematicians Al-Biruni and Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi. Functions were originally the idealization of how a varying quantity depends on another quantity. For example, the position of a planet is a ''function'' of time. Historically, the concept was elaborated with the infinitesimal calculus at the end of the 17th century, and, until the 19th century, the functions that were considered were differentiable (that is, they had a high degree of regularity). The concept of a function was formalized at the end of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microeconomics
Microeconomics is a branch of mainstream economics that studies the behavior of individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the national economy as whole, which is studied in macroeconomics. One goal of microeconomics is to analyze the market mechanisms that establish relative prices among goods and services and allocate limited resources among alternative uses. Microeconomics shows conditions under which free markets lead to desirable allocations. It also analyzes market failure, where markets fail to produce efficient results. While microeconomics focuses on firms and individuals, macroeconomics focuses on the sum total of economic activity, dealing with the issues of growth, inflation, and unemployment and with national policies relating to these issues. Microeconomics also d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Preference (economics)
In economics and other social sciences, preference is the order that an agent gives to alternatives based on their relative utility. A process which results in an "optimal choice" (whether real or theoretical). Preferences are evaluations and concern matters of value, typically in relation to practical reasoning. The character of the preferences is determined purely by a person's tastes instead of the good's prices, personal income, and the availability of goods. However, people are still expected to act in their best (rational) interest. Rationality, in this context, means that when individuals are faced with a choice, they would select the option that maximizes self-interest. Moreover, in every set of alternatives, preferences arise. The belief of preference plays a key role in many disciplines, including moral philosophy and decision theory. The logical properties that preferences possess have major effects also on rational choice theory, which has a carryover effect on a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intelligent Agent
In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is anything which perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance with learning or may use knowledge. They may be simple or complex — a thermostat is considered an example of an intelligent agent, as is a human being, as is any system that meets the definition, such as a firm, a state, or a biome. Leading AI textbooks define "artificial intelligence" as the "study and design of intelligent agents", a definition that considers goal-directed behavior to be the essence of intelligence. Goal-directed agents are also described using a term borrowed from economics, " rational agent". An agent has an "objective function" that encapsulates all the IA's goals. Such an agent is designed to create and execute whatever plan will, upon completion, maximize the expected value of the objective function. For example, a reinforcement learning agent has a "reward functi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, movement to perform an action. The term is commonly applied to artificial devices, such as those employing engines or motors, but also to na ...s, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animal cognition, animals and human intelligence, humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' of Oxford University Press defines artificial intelligence as: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI applications include advanced web se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Entropic Risk Measure
In financial mathematics (concerned with mathematical modeling of financial markets), the entropic risk measure is a risk measure which depends on the risk aversion of the user through the exponential utility function. It is a possible alternative to other risk measures as value-at-risk or expected shortfall. It is a theoretically interesting measure because it provides different risk values for different individuals whose attitudes toward risk may differ. However, in practice it would be difficult to use since quantifying the risk aversion for an individual is difficult to do. The entropic risk measure is the prime example of a convex risk measure which is not coherent. Given the connection to utility function 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 philosoph ...s, it can be us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Risk Measure
In financial mathematics, a risk measure is used to determine the amount of an asset or set of assets (traditionally currency) to be kept in reserve. The purpose of this reserve is to make the risks taken by financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, acceptable to the regulator. In recent years attention has turned towards convex and coherent risk measurement. Mathematically A risk measure is defined as a mapping from a set of random variables to the real numbers. This set of random variables represents portfolio returns. The common notation for a risk measure associated with a random variable X is \rho(X). A risk measure \rho: \mathcal \to \mathbb \cup \ should have certain properties: ; Normalized : \rho(0) = 0 ; Translative : \mathrm\; a \in \mathbb \; \mathrm \; Z \in \mathcal ,\;\mathrm\; \rho(Z + a) = \rho(Z) - a ; Monotone : \mathrm\; Z_1,Z_2 \in \mathcal \;\mathrm\; Z_1 \leq Z_2 ,\; \mathrm \; \rho(Z_2) \leq \rho(Z_1) Set-valued In a situatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indifference Price
In finance, indifference pricing is a method of pricing financial securities with regard to a utility function. The indifference price is also known as the reservation price or private valuation. In particular, the indifference price is the price at which an agent would have the same expected utility level by exercising a financial transaction as by not doing so (with optimal trading otherwise). Typically the indifference price is a pricing range (a bid–ask spread) for a specific agent; this price range is an example of good-deal bounds. Mathematics Given a utility function u and a claim C_T with known payoffs at some terminal time T, let the function V: \mathbb \times \mathbb \to \mathbb be defined by : V(x,k) = \sup_ \mathbb\left \left(X_T + k C_T\right)\right/math>, where x is the initial endowment, \mathcal(x) is the set of all self-financing portfolios at time T starting with endowment x, and k is the number of the claim to be purchased (or sold). Then the indiffer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asset
In financial accounting, an asset is any resource owned or controlled by a business or an economic entity. It is anything (tangible or intangible) that can be used to produce positive economic value. Assets represent value of ownership that can be converted into cash (although cash itself is also considered an asset). The balance sheet of a firm records the monetaryThere are different methods of assessing the monetary value of the assets recorded on the Balance Sheet. In some cases, the ''Historical Cost'' is used; such that the value of the asset when it was bought in the past is used as the monetary value. In other instances, the present fair market value of the asset is used to determine the value shown on the balance sheet. value of the assets owned by that firm. It covers money and other valuables belonging to an individual or to a business. Assets can be grouped into two major classes: tangible assets and intangible assets. Tangible assets contain various subclasses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
