Figure 1 leads to an important conclusion about the consumerâs gains from his purchases. The diagram shows that the difference between 10 and 11 slices of bread is worth nine cents to the consumer (marginal utility="nine" cents). Similarly, a 12th slice of bread is worth eight cents (see the shaded bars). Thus, the two slices of bread together are worth 17 cents, the area of the two rectangles together. Suppose the price of bread is actually three cents, and the consumer, therefore, purchases 30 slices per day. The total value of his purchases to him is the sum of the areas of all such rectangles for each of the 30 slices; i.e., it is (approximately) equal to all of the area under the demand curve; that is, the area defined by the points 0CBE. The amount the consumer pays, however, is less than this area. His total expenditure is given by the area of rectangle 0CBDâ90 cents. The difference between these two areas, the quasi-triangular area DBE, represents how much more the consumer would be willing to spend on the bread over and above the 90 cents he actually pays for it, if he were forced to do so. It represents the absolute maximum that could be extracted from the consumer for the bread by an unscrupulous merchant who had cornered the market. Since, normally, the consumer only pays quantity 0CBD, the area DBE is a net gain derived by the consumer from the transaction. It is called consumersâ surplus. Virtually every purchase yields such a surplus to the buyer.
The concept of consumersâ surplus is important for public policy, because it offers at least a crude measure of the public benefits of various types of economic activity. In deciding whether a government agency should build a dam, for example, one may estimate the consumersâ surplus from the electricity the dam would generate and seek to compare it with the surplus that could be yielded by alternative uses of the resources needed to construct and operate the dam.
Utility measurement and ordinal utility
As originally conceived, utility was taken to be a subjective measure of strength of feeling. An item that might be described as worth â40 utilsâ was to be interpreted to yield âtwice as much pleasureâ as one valued at 20 utils. It was not long before the usefulness of this concept was questioned. It was criticized for its subjectivity and the difficulty (if not impossibility) of quantifying it. An alternative line of analysis developed that was able to accomplish most of the same purposes but without as many assumptions. First introduced by the economists F.Y. Edgeworth in England (1881) and Vilfredo Pareto in Italy (1896â97), it was brought to fruition by Eugen Slutsky in Russia (1915) and J.R. Hicks and R.D.G. Allen in Great Britain (1934). The idea was that to analyze consumer choice between, say, two bundles of commodities, A and B, given their costs, one need know only that one is preferred to another. This may at first seem a trivial observation, but it is not as simple as it sounds.
Figure 2: Commodities X and Y (see text).
EncyclopĂŠdia Britannica, Inc.
In the following discussion, it is assumed for simplicity that there are only two commodities in the world. Figure 2 is a graph in which the axes measure the quantities of two commodities, X and Y. Thus, point A represents a bundle composed of seven units of commodity X and five units of commodity Y. The assumption is made that the consumer prefers to own more of either or both commodities. That means he must prefer bundle C to bundle A, because C lies directly to the right of A and hence contains more of X and no less of Y. Similarly, B must be preferred to A. But one cannot say, in general, whether A is preferred to D or vice versa, since one offers more of X and the other more of Y.
Figure 3: Indifference curves (see text).
EncyclopĂŠdia Britannica, Inc.
The consumer may in fact not care whether he receives A or Dâthat is, he may be indifferent (see Figure 3). Assuming that there is some continuity in his preferences, there will be a locus connecting A and D, any point on which (E or A or D) represents bundles of commodities of equal interest to this consumer. This locus (IâIâČ in Figure 3) is called an indifference curve. It represents the consumerâs subjective trade off between the two commoditiesâhow much more of one he will have to get to make up for the loss of a given amount of another. That is, one may treat the choice between bundle D and bundle E as involving the comparison of the gain of quantity FD of X with the loss of FE of Y. If the consumer is indifferent between D and E, the gain and loss just offset one another; hence, they indicate the proportion in which he is willing to exchange the two commodities. In mathematical terms, FE divided by FD represents the average slope of the indifference curve over arc ED; it is called the marginal rate of substitution between X and Y.
Figure 3 also contains other indifference curves, some representing combinations preferred to A (curves lying above and to the right of A) and some representing combinations to which A is preferred. These are like contour lines on a map, each such line being a locus of combinations that the consumer considers equally desirable. Conceptually, through every point in the diagram there is an indifference curve. Figure 3, with its family of indifference curves, is called an indifference map. This map obviously does no more than rank the available possibilities; it indicates whether one point is preferred to another but not by how much it is preferred.
It is easy to show that at any point such as E the slope of the indifference curve, roughly FE divided by ED, equals the ratio of the marginal utility of X to the marginal utility of Y for the corresponding quantities. For in moving from E to D the consumer gives up FE of Y, a loss valued, by definition, at approximately FE multiplied by the marginal utility of Y, and he gains FD of X, a gain worth FD multiplied by the marginal utility of X. Relative marginal utilities can be measured in this way because their ratio does not measure subjective quantitiesârather, it represents a rate of exchange of two commodities. The marginal utility of X measured in money terms tells one how much of the commodity used as money the consumer is willing to give for more of the commodity X but not what psychic pleasure the consumer gains.
