Intermediate Microeconomics and Its Application 12th Edition by Walter Nicholson,Christopher Snyder

Exercise 24

A careful reader of this book will have read footnote 2 and footnote 5 in this chapter. Explain why these can be summarized by the commonsense idea that a person is maximizing his or her utility only if getting an extra dollar to spend would provide the same amount of extra utility no matter which good he or she chooses to spend it on. (Hint: Suppose this condition were not true-is utility as large as possible?)