Until the appearance of the first wave of studies focusing on the hypothesis of the clarity of responsibility, the theory of economic voting implicitly assumed that the government is held responsible for the economic conditions of the country. Departing from previous studies based upon the...

This paper examines some of the consequences for economic theory of the replacement of binary personal preferences by non-binary personal preferences in an Arrow-Debreu society as in Debreu (1959), and reaches the conclusion that there is both much damage to existing theory and greater...

This paper presents an original description and a semi-formal definition of the concept of a value proposition, which has been so far used in service science rather intuitively. Our approach is based on utility functions and conceptual modelling techniques. The proposed semi-formalization can be...

Luenberger [8] introduced the so-called benefit function that converts preferences into a numerical function that has some cardinal meaning. This measure has a number of remarkable properties and is a powerful tool in analyzing welfare issues ([10], [12], [13], [14]). This paper studies the...

A method of small-area estimation with a utility function is developed. The utility characterises a policy planned to be implemented in each area, based on the area's estimate of a key quantity. It is shown by simulations that the commonly applied composite and empirical Bayes estimators are...

This paper analyzes how the indeterminacy of competitive equilibrium in one-sector growth models depends on the magnitude of the households' income effect on the demand for leisure. The paper first establishes that the presence of income effect is necessary for the existence of an indeterminate...

This note concerns Markov decision processes on a discrete state space. It is supposed that the reward function is nonnegative, and that the decision maker has a nonnull constant risk-sensitivity, which leads to grade random rewards via the expectation of an exponential utility function. The...

The paper contrasts early theories of the utility function (starting with Bentham and elaborated by Jevons) with the modern theory (laid down by Fisher and Samuelson).  The former include in the utility function not only the sensation of current events but also the memory of past events and the...

We identify necessary and sufficient conditions under which a finite data set of price vectors and consumption bundles can be rationalized by a weakly separable utility function.  Our result could be understood as a generalization of Afriat's Theorem.