Chapter 5

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Choice
Introduction. You have studied budgets, and you have studied preferences. Now is the time to put these two ideas together and do something with them. In this chapter you study the commodity bundle chosen by a utility-maximizing consumer from a given budget. Given prices and income, you know how to graph a consumer’s budget. If you also know the consumer’s preferences, you can graph some of his indifference curves. The consumer will choose the “best” indifference curve that he can reach given his budget. But when you try to do this, you have to ask yourself, “How do I find the most desirable indifference curve that the consumer can reach?” The answer to this question is “look in the likely places.” Where are the likely places? As your textbook tells you, there are three kinds of likely places. These are: (i) a tangency between an indifference curve and the budget line; (ii) a kink in an indifference curve; (iii) a “corner” where the consumer specializes in consuming just one good. Here is how you find a point of tangency if we are told the consumer’s utility function, the prices of both goods, and the consumer’s income. The budget line and an indifference curve are tangent at a point (x1 , x2 ) if they have the same slope at that point. Now the slope of an indifference curve at (x1 , x2 ) is the ratio −M U1 (x1 , x2 )/M U2 (x1 , x2 ). (This slope is also known as the marginal rate of substitution.) The slope of the budget line is −p1 /p2 . Therefore an indifference curve is tangent to the budget line at the point (x1 , x2 ) when M U1 (x1 , x2 )/M U2 (x1 , x2 ) = p1 /p2 . This gives us one equation in the two unknowns, x1 and x2 . If we hope to solve for the x’s, we need another equation. That other equation is the budget equation p1 x1 + p2 x2 = m. With these two equations you can solve for (x1 , x2 ).∗

Example: A consumer has the utility