In economics, utility is a measure of the satisfaction that a certain person has from a certain state of the world. Over time, the term has been used in at least two different meanings.
In probability theory and statistics, the gamma distribution is a versatile two-parameter family of continuous probability distributions. The exponential distribution, Erlang distribution, and chi-squared distribution are special cases of the gamma distribution. There are two equivalent parameterizations in common use:
- With a shape parameter k and a scale parameter θ
- With a shape parameter and an inverse scale parameter , called a rate parameter.
In economics and econometrics, the Cobb–Douglas production function is a particular functional form of the production function, widely used to represent the technological relationship between the amounts of two or more inputs and the amount of output that can be produced by those inputs. The Cobb–Douglas form was developed and tested against statistical evidence by Charles Cobb and Paul Douglas between 1927 and 1947; according to Douglas, the functional form itself was developed earlier by Philip Wicksteed.
In quantum mechanics, a particle in a spherically symmetric potential is a system with a potential that depends only on the distance between the particle and a center. A particle in a spherically symmetric potential can be used as an approximation, for example, of the electron in a hydrogen atom or of the formation of chemical bonds.
In physics and astronomy, the Reissner–Nordström metric is a static solution to the Einstein–Maxwell field equations, which corresponds to the gravitational field of a charged, non-rotating, spherically symmetric body of mass M. The analogous solution for a charged, rotating body is given by the Kerr–Newman metric.
In physics, the Hamilton–Jacobi equation, named after William Rowan Hamilton and Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, is an alternative formulation of classical mechanics, equivalent to other formulations such as Newton's laws of motion, Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics.
In mathematics and physics, the Christoffel symbols are an array of numbers describing a metric connection. The metric connection is a specialization of the affine connection to surfaces or other manifolds endowed with a metric, allowing distances to be measured on that surface. In differential geometry, an affine connection can be defined without reference to a metric, and many additional concepts follow: parallel transport, covariant derivatives, geodesics, etc. also do not require the concept of a metric. However, when a metric is available, these concepts can be directly tied to the "shape" of the manifold itself; that shape is determined by how the tangent space is attached to the cotangent space by the metric tensor. Abstractly, one would say that the manifold has an associated (orthonormal) frame bundle, with each "frame" being a possible choice of a coordinate frame. An invariant metric implies that the structure group of the frame bundle is the orthogonal group O(p, q). As a result, such a manifold is necessarily a (pseudo-)Riemannian manifold. The Christoffel symbols provide a concrete representation of the connection of (pseudo-)Riemannian geometry in terms of coordinates on the manifold. Additional concepts, such as parallel transport, geodesics, etc. can then be expressed in terms of Christoffel symbols.
Merton's portfolio problem is a problem in continuous-time finance and in particular intertemporal portfolio choice. An investor must choose how much to consume and must allocate their wealth between stocks and a risk-free asset so as to maximize expected utility. The problem was formulated and solved by Robert C. Merton in 1969 both for finite lifetimes and for the infinite case. Research has continued to extend and generalize the model to include factors like transaction costs and bankruptcy.
In mathematics, the Schur orthogonality relations, which were proven by Issai Schur through Schur's lemma, express a central fact about representations of finite groups. They admit a generalization to the case of compact groups in general, and in particular compact Lie groups, such as the rotation group SO(3).
A ratio distribution is a probability distribution constructed as the distribution of the ratio of random variables having two other known distributions. Given two random variables X and Y, the distribution of the random variable Z that is formed as the ratio Z = X/Y is a ratio distribution.
In mathematics, Maass forms or Maass wave forms are studied in the theory of automorphic forms. Maass forms are complex-valued smooth functions of the upper half plane, which transform in a similar way under the operation of a discrete subgroup of as modular forms. They are eigenforms of the hyperbolic Laplace operator defined on and satisfy certain growth conditions at the cusps of a fundamental domain of . In contrast to modular forms, Maass forms need not be holomorphic. They were studied first by Hans Maass in 1949.
In economics, elasticity of intertemporal substitution is a measure of responsiveness of the growth rate of consumption to the real interest rate. If the real interest rate rises, current consumption may decrease due to increased return on savings; but current consumption may also increase as the household decides to consume more immediately, as it is feeling richer. The net effect on current consumption is the elasticity of intertemporal substitution.
In macroeconomics, the cost of business cycles is the decrease in social welfare, if any, caused by business cycle fluctuations.
In finance, economics, and decision theory, hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) refers to a type of risk aversion that is particularly convenient to model mathematically and to obtain empirical predictions from. It refers specifically to a property of von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions, which are typically functions of final wealth, and which describe a decision-maker's degree of satisfaction with the outcome for wealth. The final outcome for wealth is affected both by random variables and by decisions. Decision-makers are assumed to make their decisions so as to maximize the expected value of the utility function.
In economics, King–Plosser–Rebelo preferences are a particular functional form of utility that is used in many macroeconomic models and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. Having originally been proposed in an article that appeared in the Journal of Monetary Economics in 1988, the corresponding technical appendix detailing their derivation has only been published in 2002.
The Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) is a consumer demand model used primarily by economists to study consumer behavior. The AIDS model gives an arbitrary second-order approximation to any demand system and has many desirable qualities of demand systems. For instance it satisfies the axioms of order, aggregates over consumers without invoking parallel linear Engel curves, is consistent with budget constraints, and is simple to estimate.
The Atkinson–Stiglitz theorem is a theorem of public economics. It implies that no indirect taxes need to be employed where the utility function is separable between labor and all commodities. Non-linear income taxation can be used by the government and was in a seminal article by Joseph Stiglitz and Anthony Atkinson in 1976. The Atkinson–Stiglitz theorem is generally considered one an important theoretical result in public economics and spawned a broad literature that delimited the conditions under which the theorem holds For example, Saez (2002) demonstrated that the Atkinson–Stiglitz theorem does not hold if households have heterogeneous preferences rather than homogeneous ones. In practice, the Atkinson–Stiglitz theorem has often been invoked in the debate on optimal capital income taxation. Because capital income taxation can be interpreted as the taxation of future consumption over the taxation of present consumption, the theorem implies that governments should abstain from capital income taxation if non-linear income taxation is an option since capital income taxation would not improve equity by comparison to the non-linear income tax, while additionally distorting savings.
Jaimovich-Rebelo preferences refer to a utility function that allows to parameterize the strength of short-run wealth effects on the labor supply, originally developed by Nir Jaimovich and Sergio Rebelo in their 2009 article Can News about the Future Drive the Business Cycle?
Batch normalization is a method used to make training of artificial neural networks faster and more stable through normalization of the layers' inputs by re-centering and re-scaling. It was proposed by Sergey Ioffe and Christian Szegedy in 2015.
In fluid dynamics, Hicks equation, sometimes also referred as Bragg–Hawthorne equation or Squire–Long equation, is a partial differential equation that describes the distribution of stream function for axisymmetric inviscid fluid, named after William Mitchinson Hicks, who derived it first in 1898. The equation was also re-derived by Stephen Bragg and William Hawthorne in 1950 and by Robert R. Long in 1953 and by Herbert Squire in 1956. The Hicks equation without swirl was first introduced by George Gabriel Stokes in 1842. The Grad–Shafranov equation appearing in plasma physics also takes the same form as the Hicks equation.
