"Utility maximization" refers to the concept of making decisions or choices that bring you the most benefit or satisfaction. It means prioritizing and selecting options that provide the highest level of usefulness or well-being, based on your preferences and priorities.
Full definition
In delegating, the end investor does not mandate that the manager must evaluate securities based on the investor's
utility maximization problem, and a natural alignment of the investor's and manager's interests is not present: managers are incentivized to outperform relative to a stated benchmark or to peers, rather than to operationalize the consumption model of the end investor.
These competing theories have led to two primary investing paradigms (active
for utility maximization, passive for regret minimization).
The better the ranking produced by the metric aligns with
the utility maximization ranking, the better the metric.