Gossen's Second “Law”, named for Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810–1858), is the assertion that an economic agent will allocate his or her expenditures such that the ratio of the marginal utility of each good or service to its price (the marginal expenditure necessary for its acquisition) is equal to that for every other good or service. Formally,
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where
Informal derivation
Imagine that an agent has spent money on various sorts of goods or services. If the last unit of currency spent on goods or services of one sort bought a quantity with less marginal utility than that which would have been associated with the quantity of another sort that could have been bought with the money, then the agent would have been better off instead buying more of that other good or service. Assuming that goods and services are continuously divisible, the only way that it is possible that the marginal expenditure on one good or service should not yield more utility than the marginal expenditure on the other (or vice versa) is if the marginal expenditures yield equal utility.
Formal derivation
Assume that utility, goods, and services have the requisite properties so that
subject to a budget constraint
where
Using the method of Lagrange multipliers, one constructs the function
and finds the first-order conditions for optimization as
(which simply implies that all of
so that
which is algebraically equivalent to
Since every such ratio is equal to
(Note that, as with any maximization using first-order conditions, the equations will hold only if the utility function satisfies specific concavity requirements and does not have maxima on the edges of the set over which one is maximizing.)