In microeconomics, the utility maximization problem is the problem consumers face: "how should I spend my money in order to maximize my utility?" It is a type of optimal decision problem. It consists of choosing how much of each available good or service to consume, taking into account a constraint on total spending as well as the prices of the goods.
Basic setup
Suppose the consumer's consumption set, or the enumeration of all possible consumption bundles that could be selected if there were no budget constraint, has L commodities and is limited to positive amounts of consumption of each commodity. Let x be the vectorx= containing the amounts of each commodity; then Suppose also that the price vector of the L commodities is positive, and that the consumer's income is ; then the set of all affordable packages, the budget set, is where is the dot product of p and x, or the total cost of consuming x of the products at price levelp: The consumer would like to buythe best affordable package of commodities. It is assumed that the consumer has an ordinal utility function, called u. It is a real valued function with domain being the set of all commodity bundles, or Then the consumer's optimalchoice is the utility maximizing bundle of all bundles in the budget set, or Finding is the utility maximization problem. If u is continuous and no commodities are free of charge, then exists, but it is not necessarily unique. If there is a unique maximizer for all values of the price and wealth parameters, then is called the Marshallian demand function; otherwise, is set-valued and it is called the Marshallian demand correspondence.
Reaction to changes in prices
For a given level of real wealth, only relative prices matter to consumers, not absolute prices. If consumers reacted to changes in nominal prices and nominal wealth even if relative prices and real wealth remained unchanged, this would be an effect called money illusion. The mathematical first order conditions for a maximum of the consumer problem guarantee that the demand for each good is homogeneous of degree zero jointly in nominal prices and nominal wealth, so there is no money illusion.
In practice, a consumer may not always pick an optimal package. For example, it may require too much thought. Bounded rationality is a theory that explains this behaviour with satisficing—picking packages that are suboptimal but good enough.
