Ptential Utility abstract - Essay Example

New Example and Direction of the Application of Potential Utility Model The present article aims to introduce a new example of the application of the potential utility model, which is a mathematical model dealing with education of subjects with incomplete information, and to analyze the problem of altruism and selfishness in agent’s potential utility function. In order to overcome the problem of information incompletion related to infectious disease, a vaccination is introduced as a new application example.

As a result of a comparative static analysis of the mathematical model, it is revealed that it is effective to spend large amount of information completion cost for those citizens who have significant false recognition of vaccination effects, who pay less for vaccination and who have high utility sensitivity to vaccination. In addition, although from past studies, including author’s one, the potential utility has been treated as a concept of containing altruistic flavors including ethical utility and procedural utility, however, the current t article argues that such treatment is not always valid and the potential utility should be treated as a utility with variable weight of altruism/selfishness depending on problems arising.