Preference (economics)
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Preference (economics)
In economics, and in other social sciences, preference refers to an order by which an Agent (economics), agent, while in search of an "optimal choice", ranks alternatives based on their respective utility. ''Preferences'' are evaluations that concern matters of value, in relation to practical reasoning. Individual preferences are determined by taste, need, ..., as opposed to price, availability or personal income. Classical economics assumes that people act in their best (rational) interest. In this context, rationality would dictate that, when given a choice, an individual will select an option that maximizes their self-interest. But preferences are not always transitive relation, transitive, both because real humans are far from always being rational and because in some situations preferences can form cycle (graph theory), cycles, in which case there exists no well-defined optimal choice. An example of this is Efron dice. The concept of preference plays a key role in many discip ...
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Preference Example
In psychology, economics and philosophy, preference is a technical term usually used in relation to choosing between alternatives. For example, someone prefers A over B if they would rather choose A than B. Preferences are central to decision theory because of this relation to behavior. Some methods such as Ordinal Priority Approach use preference relation for decision-making. As connative states, they are closely related to desires. The difference between the two is that desires are directed at one object while preferences concern a comparison between two alternatives, of which one is preferred to the other. In insolvency, the term is used to determine which outstanding obligation the insolvent party has to settle first. Psychology In psychology, preferences refer to an individual's attitude towards a set of objects, typically reflected in an explicit decision-making process. The term is also used to mean evaluative judgment in the sense of liking or disliking an object, as in ...
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Explanatory Research
Causal research, is the investigation of (research into) cause-relationships. To determine causality, variation in the variable presumed to influence the difference in another variable(s) must be detected, and then the variations from the other variable(s) must be calculated (s). Other confounding influences must be controlled for so they don't distort the results, either by holding them constant in the experimental creation of evidence. This type of research is very complex and the researcher can never be completely certain that there are no other factors influencing the causal relationship, especially when dealing with people's attitudes and motivations. There are often much deeper psychological considerations that even the respondent may not be aware of. There are two research methods for exploring the cause-and-effect relationship between variables: # Experimentation (e.g., in a laboratory), and # Statistical research. Experimentation Experiments are typically conducted i ...
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Binary Relation
In mathematics, a binary relation associates some elements of one Set (mathematics), set called the ''domain'' with some elements of another set called the ''codomain''. Precisely, a binary relation over sets X and Y is a set of ordered pairs (x, y), where x is an element of X and y is an element of Y. It encodes the common concept of relation: an element x is ''related'' to an element y, if and only if the pair (x, y) belongs to the set of ordered pairs that defines the binary relation. An example of a binary relation is the "divides" relation over the set of prime numbers \mathbb and the set of integers \mathbb, in which each prime p is related to each integer z that is a Divisibility, multiple of p, but not to an integer that is not a Multiple (mathematics), multiple of p. In this relation, for instance, the prime number 2 is related to numbers such as -4, 0, 6, 10, but not to 1 or 9, just as the prime number 3 is related to 0, 6, and 9, but not to 4 or 13. Binary relations ...
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Logical Positivism
Logical positivism, also known as logical empiricism or neo-positivism, was a philosophical movement, in the empiricist tradition, that sought to formulate a scientific philosophy in which philosophical discourse would be, in the perception of its proponents, as authoritative and meaningful as empirical science. Logical positivism's central thesis was the verification principle, also known as the "verifiability criterion of meaning", according to which a statement is ''cognitively meaningful'' only if it can be verified through empirical observation or if it is a tautology (true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form). The verifiability criterion thus rejected statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as ''cognitively meaningless'' in terms of truth value or factual content. Despite its ambition to overhaul philosophy by mimicking the structure and process of empirical science, logical positivism became erroneously stereotyped as an agenda t ...
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Anton Barten
Anton Peter Barten (14 January 1930 – 15 June 2016)Barten, A.P.
in ''De leden van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen: een demografisch perspectief: 1808 tot 2008'', p. 251.
was a Dutch economist. Barten was born in . He studied economics at the and obtained his PhD at the . He worked at the
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Ragnar Frisch
Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch (3 March 1895 – 31 January 1973) was an influential Norwegian economist and econometrician known for being one of the major contributors to establishing economics as a quantitative and statistically informed science in the early 20th century. He coined the term econometrics in 1926 for utilising statistical methods to describe economic systems, as well as the terms microeconomics and macroeconomics in 1933, for describing individual and aggregate economic systems, respectively. He was the first to develop a statistically informed model of business cycles in 1933. Later work on the model, together with Jan Tinbergen, won the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969. Frisch became dr.philos. with a thesis on mathematics and statistics at the University of Oslo in 1926''.'' After his doctoral thesis, he spent five years researching in the United States at the University of Minnesota and Yale University. After teaching briefly at Yale from ...
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Neoclassical Economics
Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics in which the production, consumption, and valuation (pricing) of goods and services are observed as driven by the supply and demand model. According to this line of thought, the value of a good or service is determined through a hypothetical maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by firms facing production costs and employing available information and factors of production. This approach has often been justified by appealing to rational choice theory. Neoclassical economics is the dominant approach to microeconomics and, together with Keynesian economics, formed the neoclassical synthesis which dominated mainstream economics as "neo-Keynesian economics" from the 1950s onward. Classification The term was originally introduced by Thorstein Veblen in his 1900 article "Preconceptions of Economic Science", in which he related marginalists in the tradition of Alfred Marshall ''et al.'' to ...
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Carl Christian Von Weizsäcker
Carl Christian von Weizsäcker (born in Berlin on January 28, 1938) is a German economist who currently works as a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods (MPI-EG), having emerited from the University of Cologne in 2003. Throughout his career, von Weizsäcker has worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the universities of Heidelberg, Bielefeld, Bonn, Bern and Cologne. His research focuses on welfare economics, the theory of capital, the history of economics, the Eurozone crisis, climate policy, and the social market economy. Within his profession, he is notably a founding member and fellow of the European Economic Association. In 2014, von Weizsäcker was awarded the Gustav Stolper Prize in recognition for his contributions to economic debate in Germany. He is also a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest lear ...
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Economic Equilibrium
In economics, economic equilibrium is a situation in which the economic forces of supply and demand are balanced, meaning that economic variables will no longer change. Market equilibrium in this case is a condition where a market price is established through competition such that the amount of goods or services sought by buyers is equal to the amount of goods or services produced by sellers. This price is often called the competitive price or market clearing price and will tend not to change unless demand or supply changes, and quantity is called the "competitive quantity" or market clearing quantity. Understanding economic equilibrium An economic equilibrium is a situation when the economic agent cannot change the situation by adopting any strategy. The concept has been borrowed from the physical sciences. Take a system where physical forces are balanced for instance.This economically interpreted means no further change ensues. Properties of equilibrium Three basic prope ...
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Utility Maximization Problem
Utility maximization was first developed by utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In microeconomics, the utility maximization problem is the problem consumers face: "How should I spend my money in order to maximize my utility?" It is a type of Optimal decision, optimal decision problem. It consists of choosing how much of each available good or service to consume, taking into account a Natural borrowing limit, constraint on total spending (income), the prices of the goods and their Preference (economics), preferences. Utility maximization is an important concept in consumer theory as it shows how consumers decide to allocate their income. Because consumers are modelled as being Rational choice theory, rational, they seek to extract the most benefit for themselves. However, due to bounded rationality and other biases, consumers sometimes pick bundles that do not necessarily maximize their utility. The utility maximization bundle of the consumer is also not ...
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Gary Becker
Gary Stanley Becker (; December 2, 1930 – May 3, 2014) was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics. Becker was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. A 2011 survey of economics professors named Becker their favorite living economist over the age of 60, followed by Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow. Economist Justin Wolfers called him "the most important social scientist in the past 50 years." Becker was one of the first economists to analyze topics that had been researched in sociology, including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and rational addiction. He argued that many different types of human behavior can be seen as rational and utility-maximizing, including those that ...
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Economic Model
An economic model is a theoretical construct representing economic processes by a set of variables and a set of logical and/or quantitative relationships between them. The economic model is a simplified, often mathematical, framework designed to illustrate complex processes. Frequently, economic models posit structural parameters. A model may have various exogenous variables, and those variables may change to create various responses by economic variables. Methodological uses of models include investigation, theorizing, and fitting theories to the world. Overview In general terms, economic models have two functions: first as a simplification of and abstraction from observed data, and second as a means of selection of data based on a paradigm of econometric study. ''Simplification'' is particularly important for economics given the enormous complexity of economic processes. This complexity can be attributed to the diversity of factors that determine economic activity; t ...
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