Seyedian co-author of chapter in applied economic philosophies text

Department of Business Administration Professor Mojtaba Seyedian is a co-author of a book chapter, “Consumption Preferences and Utilities,” in the book “Systemic Principles of Applied Economic Philosophies: Producers, Consumers, and the Firm."

The book, edited by Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest, a university professor in Pennsylvania, and published by Springer Press, answers the calls from front-line managers, entrepreneurs and scholarly researchers to reconstruct the theories of economics and business. Their request is for new theories to be more relevant to real life than the now-prevalent ones.

The following is an abstract of the chapter, which found on pages 311 to 343:

Many well-known conclusions about consumer preferences and utility representations of consumptions are developed on the assumption that possible consumptions are completely ordered. This chapter, which is mainly based on Forrest et al. (South Bus Econ J, 2023), looks at what could happen when such an unrealistic assumption is removed, hoping that the consequent theory will be more relevant to real life than before.

Different from some of the known hypotheses and/or conclusions in the literature, this chapter shows, among other results, that for an individual no matter how he prefers one consumption over another: (1) there are incomparable consumptions; (2) his consumption preferences may not be transitive; and (3) his indifference relation of consumptions in practice may not be transitive.

Although these results have been confirmed by different authors with varied settings, the authors confirmations are based purely on analytical analysis without making use of any auxiliary concepts. More importantly, this chapter generalizes the classical conclusion of Debreu (Theory of value: An axiomatic analysis of economic equilibrium, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1959) on when a continuous utility representation exists in a very different way from these published recently by Efe Ok and his colleagues. In the end, several topics of expected significance are suggested for future research.

The target audience of the book includes graduate students and scholarly researchers, particularly those who look for opportunities to develop new territories in the world of economic and business knowledge.