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In practice, a consumer may not always pick an optimal bundle. For example, it may require too much thought or too much time. Bounded rationality is a theory that explains this behaviour. Examples of alternatives to utility maximisation due to bounded rationality are; satisficing, elimination by aspects and the mental accounting heuristic.
In philosophy, Pascal's mugging is a thought experiment demonstrating a problem in expected utility maximization. A rational agent should choose actions whose outcomes, when weighted by their probability, have higher utility. But some very unlikely outcomes may have very great utilities, and these utilities can grow faster than the probability ...
Rather than assuming observed choices are the result of static utility maximization, observed choices in DDC models are assumed to result from an agent's maximization of the present value of utility, generalizing the utility theory upon which discrete choice models are based.
The problem of finding the optimal decision is a mathematical optimization problem. In practice, few people verify that their decisions are optimal, but instead use heuristics and rules of thumb to make decisions that are "good enough"—that is, they engage in satisficing .
The main problem with the expected value theory is that there might not be a unique correct way to quantify utility or to identify the best trade-offs. For example, some of the trade-offs may be intangible or qualitative.
In economics, many problems involve multiple objectives along with constraints on what combinations of those objectives are attainable.For example, consumer's demand for various goods is determined by the process of maximization of the utilities derived from those goods, subject to a constraint based on how much income is available to spend on those goods and on the prices of those goods.
For instance, from the example above in economics, if the maximal utility of two goods is achieved when the quantity of goods x and y are (−2, 5), and the utility is subject to the constraint x and y are greater than or equal to 0 (one cannot consume a negative quantity of goods) as is usually the case, then the actual solution to the problem ...
In microeconomics, the utility maximization problem and its dual problem, the expenditure minimization problem, are economic optimization problems. Insofar as they behave consistently, consumers are assumed to maximize their utility, while firms are usually assumed to maximize their profit.