Gesamtnutzens

Gesamtnutzens, often written as Gesamtnutzen (plural: Gesamtnutzens), denotes the total level of utility or satisfaction that arises from consuming goods and services within an economy. In welfare economics it refers to the sum of individual utilities across all members of society and serves as a basis for comparing different resource allocations.

When individual utilities can be measured on a common scale and are interpersonally comparable, economics often represents Gesamtnutzen by a social welfare function, for example W = Σ_i u_i(x), where x denotes the allocation of goods. In this utilitarian framing, a policy is preferred if it raises the total utility. However, if utilities are only ordinal, the sum is not meaningful, and other criteria or transformations must be used.

Applications of the concept include cost-benefit analysis and policy evaluation, where expected net changes in Gesamtnutzens are weighed against costs and distributional effects. In practice, monetary valuations are often used to approximate utilities, enabling aggregation across people and over time through discounting.

Limitations include the strong assumption of interpersonal comparability of utility, the potential neglect of inequality, and dependence on the chosen form of the social welfare function. Different ethical criteria—such as utilitarian sums versus Rawlsian maximin—can yield different conclusions about which allocations maximize Gesamtnutzens.

See also: utility, marginal utility, social welfare function, utilitarianism, cost-benefit analysis, Pareto efficiency.