There is nothing deep about the concept of utility.
There is nothing deep about the concept of utility. The idea is that people are endowed with preferences which describe how they rank different alter- natives. If preferences are complete and transitive, then there is a way in which to assign a number to each alternative that allows a person’s behavior to be described as making the choice with the highest utility. A list of options
TABLE 1.3 GRACE’S UTILITY FUNCTION
Cell Phone Provider Utility
AT&T 10
Verizon 6
Sprint 2
T-Mobile 2