Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a state of allocation of resources from which it is impossible to reallocate so as to make any one individual or preference criterion better off without making at least one individual or preference criterion worse off. The concept is named after Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Italian engineer and economist, who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution.
Within economics the concept of utility is used to model worth or value, but its usage has evolved significantly over time. The term was introduced initially as a measure of pleasure or satisfaction within the theory of utilitarianism by moral philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. But the term has been adapted and reapplied within neoclassical economics, which dominates modern economic theory, as a utility function that represents a consumer's preference ordering over a choice set. As such, it is devoid of its original interpretation as a measurement of the pleasure or satisfaction obtained by the consumer from that choice.
In economics, an indifference curve connects points on a graph representing different quantities of two goods, points between which a consumer is indifferent. That is, the consumer has no preference for one combination or bundle of goods over a different combination on the same curve. One can also refer to each point on the indifference curve as rendering the same level of utility (satisfaction) for the consumer. In other words, an indifference curve is the locus of various points showing different combinations of two goods providing equal utility to the consumer. Utility is then a device to represent preferences rather than something from which preferences come. The main use of indifference curves is in the representation of potentially observable demand patterns for individual consumers over commodity bundles.
In welfare economics, a social welfare function is a function that ranks social states as less desirable, more desirable, or indifferent for every possible pair of social states. Inputs of the function include any variables considered to affect the economic welfare of a society. In using welfare measures of persons in the society as inputs, the social welfare function is individualistic in form. One use of a social welfare function is to represent prospective patterns of collective choice as to alternative social states. The social welfare function provides the government with a simple guideline for achieving the optimal distribution of income.
The theory of consumer choice is the branch of microeconomics that relates preferences to consumption expenditures and to consumer demand curves. It analyzes how consumers maximize the desirability of their consumption as measured by their preferences subject to limitations on their expenditures, by maximizing utility subject to a consumer budget constraint.
A budget constraint represents all the combinations of goods and services that a consumer may purchase given current prices within his or her given income. Consumer theory uses the concepts of a budget constraint and a preference map to analyze consumer choices. Both concepts have a ready graphical representation in the two-good case.
In economics, the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) is the rate at which a consumer can give up some amount of one good in exchange for another good while maintaining the same level of utility. At equilibrium consumption levels, marginal rates of substitution are identical.
In microeconomics, the contract curve is the set of points representing final allocations of two goods between two people that could occur as a result of mutually beneficial trading between those people given their initial allocations of the goods. All the points on this locus are Pareto efficient allocations, meaning that from any one of these points there is no reallocation that could make one of the people more satisfied with his or her allocation without making the other person less satisfied. The contract curve is the subset of the Pareto efficient points that could be reached by trading from the people's initial holdings of the two goods. It is drawn in the Edgeworth box diagram shown here, in which each person's allocation is measured vertically for one good and horizontally for the other good from that person's origin ; one person's origin is the lower left corner of the Edgeworth box, and the other person's origin is the upper right corner of the box. The people's initial endowments are represented by a point in the diagram; the two people will trade goods with each other until no further mutually beneficial trades are possible. The set of points that it is conceptually possible for them to stop at are the points on the contract curve. However, some authors identify the contract curve as the entire Pareto efficient locus from one origin to the other.
Mechanism design is a field in economics and game theory that takes an engineering approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory. It has broad applications, from economics and politics to networked-systems.
In economics, an ordinal utility function is a function representing the preferences of an agent on an ordinal scale. The ordinal utility theory claims that it is only meaningful to ask which option is better than the other, but it is meaningless to ask how much better it is or how good it is. All of the theory of consumer decision-making under conditions of certainty can be, and typically is, expressed in terms of ordinal utility.
In game theory, the core is the set of feasible allocations that cannot be improved upon by a subset of the economy's agents. A coalition is said to improve upon or block a feasible allocation if the members of that coalition are better off under another feasible allocation that is identical to the first except that every member of the coalition has a different consumption bundle that is part of an aggregate consumption bundle that can be constructed from publicly available technology and the initial endowments of each consumer in the coalition.
In microeconomics, a consumer's Hicksian demand correspondence is the demand of a consumer over a bundle of goods that minimizes their expenditure while delivering a fixed level of utility. If the correspondence is actually a function, it is referred to as the Hicksian demand function, or compensated demand function. The function is named after John Hicks.
Gorman polar form is a functional form for indirect utility functions in economics. Imposing this form on utility allows the researcher to treat a society of utility-maximizers as if it consisted of a single 'representative' individual. Gorman showed that having the function take Gorman polar form is both necessary and sufficient for this condition to hold.
Stochastic dominance is a partial order between random variables. It is a form of stochastic ordering. The concept arises in decision theory and decision analysis in situations where one gamble can be ranked as superior to another gamble for a broad class of decision-makers. It is based on shared preferences regarding sets of possible outcomes and their associated probabilities. Only limited knowledge of preferences is required for determining dominance. Risk aversion is a factor only in second order stochastic dominance.
In economics, convex preferences are an individual's ordering of various outcomes, typically with regard to the amounts of various goods consumed, with the property that, roughly speaking, "averages are better than the extremes". The concept roughly corresponds to the concept of diminishing marginal utility without requiring utility functions.
Competitive equilibrium is the traditional concept of economic equilibrium, appropriate for the analysis of commodity markets with flexible prices and many traders, and serving as the benchmark of efficiency in economic analysis. It relies crucially on the assumption of a competitive environment where each trader decides upon a quantity that is so small compared to the total quantity traded in the market that their individual transactions have no influence on the prices. Competitive markets are an ideal standard by which other market structures are evaluated.
Multi-objective optimization is an area of multiple criteria decision making that is concerned with mathematical optimization problems involving more than one objective function to be optimized simultaneously. Multi-objective optimization has been applied in many fields of science, including engineering, economics and logistics where optimal decisions need to be taken in the presence of trade-offs between two or more conflicting objectives. Minimizing cost while maximizing comfort while buying a car, and maximizing performance whilst minimizing fuel consumption and emission of pollutants of a vehicle are examples of multi-objective optimization problems involving two and three objectives, respectively. In practical problems, there can be more than three objectives.
In economics and other social sciences, preference is the ordering of alternatives based on their relative utility, a process which results in an optimal "choice". The character of the individual preferences is determined purely by taste factors, independent of considerations of prices, income, or availability of goods.
Oliver E. Williamson hypothesised (1964) that profit maximization would not be the objective of the managers of a joint stock organisation. This theory, like other managerial theories of the firm, assumes that utility maximisation is a manager’s sole objective. However it is only in a corporate form of business organisation that a self-interest seeking manager maximise his/her own utility, since there exists a separation of ownership and control. The managers can use their ‘discretion’ to frame and execute policies which would maximise their own utilities rather than maximising the shareholders’ utilities. This is essentially the principal–agent problem. This could however threaten their job security, if a minimum level of profit is not attained by the firm to distribute among the shareholders.
Efficiency and fairness are two major goals of welfare economics. Given a set of resources and a set of agents, the goal is to divide the resources among the agents in a way that is both Pareto efficient (PE) and envy-free (EF). The goal was first defined by David Schmeidler and Menahem Yaari. Later, the existence of such allocations has been proved under various conditions.
Albouy, David. "Welfare Economics with a Full Production Economy." Economics 481. Fall 2007.
