(economics) The ability of a commodity to satisfy needs or wants; the satisfaction experienced by the consumer of that commodity.
It ambiguously allows both ‘needs’ and ‘wants’, as well as ambiguous ‘satisfaction experienced’.
The only consistent, formal definition of utility I’ve seen used in economics (or game theory) is the one I gave above. If it was clear someone was not using that definition, I might assume they were using it as more generic “preference satisfaction”, or John Stuart Mill’s difficult-to-formalize-coherently “pleasure minus pain”, or the colloquial vague “usefulness” (whence “utilitarian” is colloquially a synonym for “pragmatic”).
Do you have a source defining utility clearly and unambiguously as “the satisfaction of needs”?
No you’re right it doesn’t nail it down precisely (the satisfaction of needs or wants).
I do believe, however, that it more precisely nails it down than the wiki on here.
Or on second thoughts maybe not because we again come back to conflicting utilities: a suicidal might value being killed as higher utility than someone who is sitting on death row and doesn’t want to die.
And I was using the term utility from economics since it’s the only place I’ve heard where they use “utility function” so I naturally assumed that’s what you were talking about since even if we disagree around the edges the meanings still fit the context for the purposes of this discussion.
Yeah, that doesn’t quite nail it down either. Note Wiktionary:utility (3):
It ambiguously allows both ‘needs’ and ‘wants’, as well as ambiguous ‘satisfaction experienced’.
The only consistent, formal definition of utility I’ve seen used in economics (or game theory) is the one I gave above. If it was clear someone was not using that definition, I might assume they were using it as more generic “preference satisfaction”, or John Stuart Mill’s difficult-to-formalize-coherently “pleasure minus pain”, or the colloquial vague “usefulness” (whence “utilitarian” is colloquially a synonym for “pragmatic”).
Do you have a source defining utility clearly and unambiguously as “the satisfaction of needs”?
No you’re right it doesn’t nail it down precisely (the satisfaction of needs or wants).
I do believe, however, that it more precisely nails it down than the wiki on here.
Or on second thoughts maybe not because we again come back to conflicting utilities: a suicidal might value being killed as higher utility than someone who is sitting on death row and doesn’t want to die.
And I was using the term utility from economics since it’s the only place I’ve heard where they use “utility function” so I naturally assumed that’s what you were talking about since even if we disagree around the edges the meanings still fit the context for the purposes of this discussion.