This paper illustrates the methodological and analytical issues that characterized, as well as the personal and institutional aspects that informed the discussions leading to the definition of the current notion of cardinal utility as utility unique up to positive linear transformations. As...

Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics, published in 1871, is usually regarded as the founding document of the Austrian School of economics. Many of the School’s prominent representatives, including Friedrich Wieser, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig Mises, Hans Mayer, Friedrich August Hayek, Fritz...

This paper constitutes the start of a project dedicated to Austrian economist and economic sociologist Friedrich von Wieser (1851-1926). Its central claim is that especially in recent decades, Wieser has become a disproportionately underresearched scholar, and the paper provides a set of...

Although Cournot's mathematical economics was generally neglected until the mid- 1870s, he was taken up and carefully studied by the Scientific Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts even before his "discovery" by Walras and Jevons. The episode is reconstructed from fragmentary manuscripts of the...

Paolo Sylos Labini's Oligopoly Theory and Technical Progress (1957) is considered one of the major contributions to entry-prevention models, especially after Franco Modigliani's famous formalization. Nonetheless, Modigliani neglected Sylos Labini's major aim when reviewing his work (1958),...

Max Weber's relationship to economics in general and to the Austrian School in particular has received more attention recently. However, this literature as conducted by Weber scholars and by Austrian economists exhibits two major deficiencies. First, the studies are often either purely...

Little is known about the relationship between Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of Economics and one of the three fathers of marginal utility theory, and Karl Menger, whose Vienna Mathematical Colloquium was crucial to the development of mathematical economics. The present paper...

This working paper - like its companion, Caldwell and Klausinger 2021 - grew out of the authors' joint work on Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 (Caldwell and Klausinger 2022) and it contains material supplementing it. This paper draws to a large extent on Friedrich Hayek's own investigations into the...

This working paper - like its companion, Caldwell and Klausinger 2021 - grew out of the authors' joint work on Hayek: A Life 1899-1950 (Caldwell and Klausinger 2022) and it contains material supplementing it. This paper examines the intellectual circles of fin-desiécle Vienna in which the Hayek...

Combining concrete policy-oriented modeling strategies of World War II with what was received as traditional neoclassical theory, in 1956 Robert Solow constructed a simple, clean, and smooth-functioning "design" model that served many different purposes. As a working object it enabled...