• Utility pertains to an abstract measure of an agent’s satisfaction given a certain world state.

  • It can be seen applied in the context of Economics but also Game Theory and Machine Learning as the inverse of loss.

Utility Functions

  • A Utility Function is a function that maps a vector (representing the world state) to a real number .

  • The Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) Utility is defined as follows:

    Where are parameters for each vector component, and is the world state vector.

    • When , the utility corresponds to the case where goods are perfect substitutes.
    • As goods become perfect complements.