Utility and Optimization’s Dependence on Decision-Makers’ Underlying Value-Belief Systems

Abstract

This paper investigates how a consumer's utility and consequent optimization are determined by his/her natural endowmentsself-awareness, imagination, conscience and free will. It focuses on such general utility that is a function in the dollar value of consumption, the number of hours spent on waged work and a particular value-belief system. For the third variable, we examine that it encourages the consumption of commodities and devalues waged job; it reinforces minimal commodity consumption; and it demands a non-standard optimization. While uncovering how an individual's marginal utility from commodity consumption or waged work varies respectively with different variables, such as non-waged incomes, etc., this paper demonstrates that when an individual decides on how much commodity is to be consumed and how much labor output is to be supplied to waged work by maximizing the corresponding utility, the person's utility and his/her method of optimization are exclusively defined by his/her value-belief system.

Properties of a firm’s factor demands, optimal production correspondence, and an economy‘s aggregated supply/demand

“…Specific to this paper, due to its novel methodological approach, which was initially adopted by Debreu [7], and its emphasis on firms' natural endowments [10,12], this work establishes, among others, the following main results:…”

“…Analogous to the situation of individual persons [30], Forrest, Shao and colleagues [12] and Forrest, Hafezalkotob et al [10] demonstrate that in general each firm makes decisions and conducts its business operations by relying either consciously or unconsciously on its set of four natural endowments -self-awareness, imagination, conscience and free will. Specifically, for each chosen firm, its four natural endowments are defined as follows:…”

“…In comparison, the weights of other paths have weights 1, 2, or 3, respectively. Before moving on, let us first notice that the mod4 function or the general mod r function, for any positive real number r (for this generalized case beyond integers, see [10]), actually means periodicity 4 or r . Some of the real-life examples include 12-hour clocks, 7-day weeks, months of various numbers of days.…”

“…It is evident that in real life, these two behavioral hypotheses are simply not generally true. Firms with different systems of values and beliefs order real numbers differently and employ respectively firm-specific methods to optimize their individual objective functions [10,17,44,46]. For example, there are firms that do not place profit maximization as their primary objective [23,24].…”

“…Hence, some of the established theoretical results of economics may not apply to such agents [43]. In other words, a firm's system of values and beliefs directly affects how the firm prioritizes its decision choices and how it practically optimizes its objective function [10]. Based on this realization, this paper studies how some of the well-known properties of a firm's factor demands, optimal production correspondence, and an economy's aggregated supply/demand can be extended to the general case of no matter what a system of values and beliefs a firm may embrace, while how some other known results are only true under specific conditions.…”