Word.ws English Dictionary

first best

first best adjective: characterized by all optimality conditions being satisfiable.

Adjective

first best (not comparable)

  1. Characterized by all optimality conditions being satisfiable.
    • Here the government should avoid any policy that affects the workers' decision rules since it would harm efficiency, and the first-best way of pursuing distributional goals is through lump-sum transfers.2018, Lars Ljungqvist and Thomas J. Sargent, Recursive macroeconomic theory, 4th edition, MIT Press, page 200
    • Without a tariff, the competitive equilibrium outcome coincides with the first best allocation.2025 May, Iván Werning, Guido Lorenzoni, Veronica Guerrieri, “Tariffs as Cost-Push Shocks: Implications for Optimal Monetary Policy”, in NBER Working Paper Series, number 33772, page 5

Noun

first best (plural first bests)

  1. A situation where all optimality conditions are satisfied.

Forms of first best

Adjective
alternative formfirst-best
Noun
pluralfirst bests

Questions about first best

What does first best mean?
First best means characterized by all optimality conditions being satisfiable.
What part of speech is first best?
First best can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near first best in the dictionary

  1. first base
  2. first baseman
  3. first basemen
  4. first bases
  5. first basing
  6. first best
  7. first bests
  8. first bite free
  9. First Bloke
  10. First Blokes
  11. first blood

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: first best (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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