Outer measure and utility

Mark Voorneveld and Jörgen Weibull

No 704, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: In most economics textbooks there is a gap between the non-existence of utility functions and the existence of continuous utility functions, although upper semi-continuity is sufficient for many purposes. Starting from a simple constructive approach for countable domains and combining this with basic measure theory, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of upper semi-continuous utility functions on a wide class of domains. Although links between utility theory and measure theory have been pointed out before, to the best of our knowledge this is the first time that the present route has been taken.

Keywords: preferences; utility theory; measure theory; outer measure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C60 D01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 8 pages
Date: 2008-10-16, Revised 2009-04-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Outer measure and utility (2008)
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