Jump to content

Talk:Cardinal utility

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fair use rationale for Image:Pyat rublei 1997.jpg

[edit]

Image:Pyat rublei 1997.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 11:23, 6 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Another discussion on Cardinal Utility

[edit]

Let me re-post here an interesting debate on the issue of cardinality. Please comment there. --Forich (talk) 22:34, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal of lead section

[edit]

How about this for the lead :

Almost 300 years ago, Daniel Bernoulli (1738) became the first person to conceive subjective wealth as something which could be treated in a mathematical fashion. During the second half of the nineteenth century, other people like Gossen (1854), Jevons (1871), Menger (1871), Walras (1874) and Marshall (1890) followed him. This was a period in economics where the concept of subjective value was treated as a synonym of moral worth and psychic satisfaction, making it a parallel theory to that of Utilitarianism. According to the ideas of this period, people could measure the utility they get from consuming goods and services. Utility was thought of as some kind of psychological entity, which could be measured, and could help explain certain patterns of consumer behaviour. Some economists of this era actually believed in the existence of this quantity, but others just found it useful for their theories of choice and demand. (source: Elsevier's Handbooks of economics)

I think it suits the article but I'll put more time into it later to improve it and merge it with the current lead section. --Forich (talk) 20:17, 22 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Shift towards Ordinal Utility part

[edit]

quoting the Handbook of Game theory, i found very useful info on this:

The measurability issue waned under the ordinalist revolution of Edgeworth (1881), Fischer (1892), Pareto (1906) and Slutsky (1915), who mantained that utility represented only a person's preference order over commodity bundles or alternative riskless futures, so gradations in utility apart from its ordering are meaningless. A modest revival in measurable or 'cardinal' utility was generated by Frisch (1926), Lange (1934) and Alt (1936), who axiomatized notions of comparable preference differences. (source: Handbook of Game Theory)

I will expand the "shift toward ordinal utility" part with some of this. Any objections?--Forich (talk) 01:14, 27 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Uncertainty and expected utility

[edit]

This is good for the early debate (needs some wikifying), but it doesn't cover expected utility and the debate over whether the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function is cardinal in the sense discussed here (vN-M say no, others say yes). There's also a related debate in health economics where its common to use a zero condition - that is, the assumption that utility when you are not alive is zero.JQ (talk) 22:13, 21 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

vN-M utility functions are cardinal in the sense posted here in the article. That doesn't mean they measure utility. I could be wrong, but I think that the paper by Ellsberg in the references makes a word by word analysis of the work of vN-M. He claims that the authors meant cardinality but somehow that can only be inferred by reading certain footnotes in the right editions of their books. Otherwise, readers do not tend to interpret that vN-M were thinking of cardinality in the sense exposed here. I'll think of a way to incorporate that debate into the article when I find the time.--Forich (talk) 20:19, 22 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Found this excellente example in a paper by Tapas Majumdar:

"Suppose that the individual is faced with three alternatives and . Suppose also that in the absence of risk, the individual prefers to ; to ; and therefore to . Let and be two Lotteries such that

Suppose that the individual prefers to .

Let us now modifiy the values of and in , as eventually to arrive at the appropiate values () for which the individual is found to be indifferent between it and .

Expected utility theory tells us that:

If we now fix the arbitrary origin at (the utility index being =0 at ), and so choose our scale that the utility index at , we find:

Thus the utility function is found to be cardinal (it preserved the order of preference over except for an arbitrary choice of origin and scale). This is the same as representing these preferences by a class of utility functions related only by linear transformations.

Then you take another element and assign it a value higher/lower than depending on whether is preferred to/less preferred than . And you continue this way.

can be assumed to be a calculable money-prize in a controlled game of chance, unique up to one positive proportionality factor depending on the currency unit.

Source: Majumdar, Tapas. (1958). "Behaviourist cardinalism in utility theory". Economica, 25(97): 26-33.

I'll incorporate this same example into the entry soon.--Forich (talk) 17:20, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Welfare

[edit]

Suzumura (1999, p. 204) says that there was "a harsh ordinalist criticism in the 1930s against the epistemological basis of the 'old' welfare economics created by Pigou...". The debate on the transition from cardinal to ordinal and its implications for welfare-economics theory deserves a mention in this entry. I'll see what I can do to insert something.--Forich (talk) 14:36, 12 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

[edit]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Cardinal utility. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 02:51, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cardinal_utility&oldid=1200637071"