The 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...

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...

The paper argues that much of the theoretical work on consumer choice theory during the first third of the twentieth century actually addressed some of the same issues discussed in contemporary behavioral economics. This is not generally recognized because the discussion was tied up with the...

This paper examines how some of the main exponents of the Austrian school of economics addressed the issues related to the measurability of utility. The first part is devoted to the period before World War I. During this period, Menger and Wieser treated de facto utilities as if they were...

We characterize optimal consumption policies in a recursive intertemporal utility framework with local substitution. We establish existence and uniqueness and a version of the Kuhn-Tucker theorem characterizing the optimal consumption plan. An explicit solution is provided for the case when the...

The paper reconstructs Sraffa's assessment of utility-based and individualistic explanations of demand in Marshallian economics in the light of some fresh evidence provided by Sraffa's unpublished manuscripts of the 1920s. It is shown that Sraffa criticised the standard Marshallian explanation...

We show that all the fundamental properties of competitive equilibrium in Marshall's cardinal theory of value, as presented in Note XXI of the mathematical appendix to his Principles of Economics (1890), derive from the Strong Law of Demand. That is, existence, uniqueness, optimality, and global...

In his pivotal contributions during the marginal revolution, Leon Walras along with W.S. Jevons assigned subjective utility directly to commodities (goods and services) as, in effect, a simplifying assumption — an assumption destined to become the keystone of neoclassical economics. But this...

This paper examines elements of the complex place/role/influence of psychology in the history of consumer choice theory. The paper reviews, and then challenges, the standard narrative that psychology was "in" consumer choice theory early in the neoclassical revolution, then strictly "out" during...

It is, of course, true of science that deeper theory opens new vistas, and economics may now justifiably advance to a more essential paradigm. The basis for this deeper theory is empirical (cardinal and measurable) instant utility (feeling state, Dolan [2002]) - the time derivative of utility...