In consumer theory, a consumer's preferences are called homothetic if they can be represented by a utility function which is homogeneous of degree 1. For example, in an economy with two goods , homothetic preferences can be represented by a utility function that has the following property: for every : In mathematics, a homothetic function is a monotonic transformation of a function which is homogeneous; however, since ordinal utility functions are only defined up to an increasing monotonic transformation, there is a small distinction between the two concepts in consumer theory.