To put consumer preferences and budget constraints together to determine consumer choices. For e.g. it can contain a various food items in a bag of groceries or the combination of food clothing and furl that the consumer each day month etc. Some basic assumptions. Preferences are complete , which means that a consumer can rank all market baskets. For any two market baskets A and B, the consumer can prefer A to B or B to A, or can be indifferent.
Preferences are transitive .
So that leaving costs aside, consumer always prefer more of any good to less. Indifference curves - graphical presentations of consumer preferences. An indifference curve represents all combinations of market baskets that provide the same level of satisfaction or utility to a person or consumer. It is a set of indifference curves that describes the person's preferences. A set of indifference curves represents an ordinal ranking.