When it comes to Economics everybody is a consumer at one or
the other point and human beings as we all know have unlimited wants but
very limited resources. This is where microeconomics comes into play. It
is microeconomics that tells us how a free market economy with
its millions of consumers and producers work to decide about the allocation of
productive resources among the thousands of goods and services, more simpler
words, study of how we make decisions because we know we don't
have all the money and time in the world to purchase and do everything.
WHY
EXACTLY PIZZA’S OVER BURGERS AND WILL IT ALWAYS REMAIN THE SAME?
Now here’s where consumer preference comes into play. Consumer
preference is defined as the subjective tastes of individual consumers,
measured by their satisfaction with those items after they’ve purchased them.
This satisfaction that a consumer gets from the consumption of a good or service
is called as Utility. As individuals consume more of a good per time
period, their total utility (TU) or satisfaction increases, but their marginal
utility diminishes. Marginal utility (MU) is the extra utility received from
consuming one additional unit of the good per unit of time while holding
constant the quantity consumed of all other commodities. For example, in the case
of unlimited Pizza, you won’t be getting the same level of satisfaction after your
3rd or 4th pizza even if it is free. So, when the
Marginal Utility derived from pizza’s fall, one might choose burgers over
pizza.
ASSUMPTIONS OF CONSUMER THEORY.
The consumer theory assumes that the consumer is rational.
This implies that his preferences satisfy the following properties:
1.
They are complete; that is, given
any set of possible bundles of goods, the consumer is always capable of
deciding which one is preferable to the others and then ranking them in terms
of preference.
2.
They are reflexive; it means that
any bundle is at least as good as itself.
3.
They are transitive; meaning that if
a bundle A is
preferred to a bundle B, and this bundle is preferable to a third bundle C, then it is implied that the first
bundle will
be preferred to the third bundle.
4.
They
are continuous; there are no big jumps in the ranking of
alternatives.
The focus of all bundles that give a certain level of
utility to the consumer constitutes an indifference curve (or level curve),
which is the usual way of representing preferences. Nevertheless, in spite of
these four properties, there is still the possibility of having “special cases”
such as the existence of perfect substitutes or perfect complements, among
others, which lead to special shapes for the indifference curves. For avoiding
these cases, two additional properties are assumed:
5. Preferences
are monotonic, or “more is preferred to less”; this implies that,
given any set of two bundles, if one of them contains at least as much of all
goods and more of one good than the other, then the first bundle will be
preferred to the second.
6. Preferences
are convex; that is, any combination of two equally preferable
bundles will be more desirable than these bundles.
These five properties confer a special shape to level
curves: they are downward slopping and convex.
CONCLUSION
So, in conclusion by studying consumer preferences we
will be able to understand the needs and wants of the people and will also help
us in determining the quantity of the goods that must be produced to satisfy
the consumers and which good would yield the producer greater profits. Because
at the end we are all rational human beings with unlimited wants/needs and
limited resources.
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