Utility function

I recently volunteered to proof-read articles for the journal of a library association that I belong to. My first article was a wonderful exemplar of the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished. The paper concerned ways of getting people to make certain research products available to the general public, and was written from an economist perspective. (The journal in question is emphatically not aimed at economists.) I have some economics background, but...

This paper talked about things like the Pareto-optimal allocation of resources, non-cooperative game theory and incentive inefficiency. It contained several utility functions to be maximized and two and a half pages that consisted mostly of equations. I spent about a week, off and on, editing it, and there were individual sentences that I spent as much as fifteen minutes trying to decode with the help of a colleague with an economics degree.

I'm pretty sure I now understand the paper, and I'm also pretty sure that I can sum the whole thing up as follows: to get people to do X (X being the action of concern here), you need either a reward that is higher than the cost of doing X or a punishment that is more costly than the cost of doing X. Otherwise, it makes more sense for them to not do it.

I can think of no way in which either the writing or the reading of this paper can possibly maximize any sort of utility function. Unless the original author just really enjoys doing that sort of thing, I guess.