Question
Question 5: consumer faces a utility function of the form: U-WC Where Wand Care the quantity of Wine (W) and Cheese (C) consumed. Given that the price of a unit of Wine is 3 per glass and the price of a unit of cheese is 6 perkg and the consumer has income of 3,000 to spend on both products. Required: a) Use the Lagrangian approach to find the optimum consumption bundle?ao marks)
Answer
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(233 Votes)
Kyle
Master · Tutor for 5 years
Answer
The optimal consumption bundle (W*, C*) and the value of
can be found by solving the first-order conditions. The second-order conditions confirm whether these values indeed maximize the consumer's utility. Note that, to complete the math operations and specify the value results involved in this question which are not explicitly provided, such as the
and evaluating second derivatives against these targeted values of
and
. And simultaneously solving the optimization problem formulated in the Lagrangian would use an algebraic computation approach.
Explanation
## Step1: The given utility function is
, where
and
are the quantities of wine and cheese consumed respectively. The prices of wine and cheese are
56 per unit respectively, and the consumer's budget is $3000. The consumer's budget constraint is therefore
.## Step2: We use the Lagrangian method to solve this constrained optimization problem. The Lagrangian function is given by \(L(W, C, \lambda) = WC - \lambda(53W + 56C - 3000)\).## Step3: The first-order conditions are obtained by taking the derivative of the Lagrangian function with respect to
,
, and
, and setting each equal to zero. This gives us the following equations:###
###
###
## Step4: We solve these equations simultaneously to find the optimal values of
,
, and
.## Step5: To verify that the solution is indeed a maximum, we check the second-order conditions. The second derivatives of the Lagrangian function with respect to
,
, and
should all be negative.