Investopedia contributors come from a range of backgrounds, and over 25 years there have been thousands of expert writers and editors who have contributed. In economics, demand is the consumer's ...

A utility function measures a consumer’s preference and satisfaction with different goods or services. As part of rational choice theory, it helps economists analyze how consumers make decisions to ...

Mathematics of Operations Research, Vol. 41, No. 1 (February 2016), pp. 146-173 (28 pages) This paper investigates the problem of maximizing expected terminal utility in a (generically incomplete) ...

Utility functions offer a means to encode objectives and preferences in investor portfolios. The functions allow one to place a score on outcomes and then identify optimal portfolios by maximizing ...