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Gossen's laws: Wikis

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Updated live from Wikipedia, last check: June 19, 2013 00:25 UTC (37 seconds ago)

Gossen's laws, named for Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810 – 1858), are three ostensible laws of economics:

$\frac{\partial U/\partial x_i}{p_i}=\frac{\partial U/\partial x_j}{p_j}\,\forall\left(i,j\right)$
where
• U is utility
• xi is quantity of the i-th good or service
• pi is the price of the i-th good or service
• Gossen's Third Law is that scarcity is a precondition for economic value.

References

• Gossen, Hermann Heinrich; Die Entwicklung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs und der daraus fließenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln (1854). Translated into English as The Laws of Human Relations and the Rules of Human Action Derived Therefrom (1983) MIT Press, ISBN 0262070901.