how do you measure economic utility 
while there is no direct way to measure the utility of a certain good for an individual consumer it is possible to estimate utility through indirect observation for example if a consumer is willing to spend 1 for a bottle of water but not 1 50 economists can safely state that a bottle of water has economic utility somewhere between 1 and 1 50 however this becomes difficult in practice because of the number of variables that are present in a typical consumer s choices 