The paper shows that cardinal utility entered economic analysis during the Ordinal Revolution initiated by Pareto and not, as many popular histories of utility theory assume, before it. Cardinal utility was the outcome of a discussion begun by Pareto about the capacity of ranking transitions...

This paper reconstructs the history of experimental research on consumer demand behavior between 1930 and 1970. The backgrounds of the experiments and their impact on the development of consumption theory are also investigated. Among other things, the paper shows that in fact many prominent...

In 1913, the Cambridge logician W.E. Johnson published a famous article on demand theory in the Economic Journal. Although Johnson’s treatment of the subject strongly resembles the analysis set forth by Pareto in the Manual of Political Economy, Johnson does not cite the Italian economist....

This paper examines the history of the neoclassical theory of consumer demand from 1871 to 1971 by bringing into play the knowledge theory of the Marburg School, a Neo-Kantian philosophical movement. The work aims to show the usefulness of a Marburg-inspired epistemology in rationalizing the...

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...

In this chapter I review the contributions to utility theory that Paul Samuelson made when he was a PhD student at Harvard, from the first scientific papers he began writing in 1936 to the dissertation he submitted in November 1940. Based on this review, I make three points: (1) After exploring...

This paper is the penultimate version of the Prologue to my book Measuring Utility. From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press in the series Oxford Studies in the History of Economics

Nash is famous for many inventions, but it is less known that he, simultaneously with Marschak, also was the first to axiomatize expected utility for risk. In particular, these authors were the first to state the independence condition, a condition that should have been but was not stated by von...

Based on the correspondence between Paul Samuelson, Leonard Jimmie Savage, Milton Friedman and Jacob Marschak between May and September 1950, the article reconstructs the joint intellectual journey that led Samuelson to accept expected utility theory and Savage to revise his initial motivations...

The paper studies the origin, content and impact of two experiments to measure the utility of money, namely that performed by Mosteller and Nogee in 1948-1949 and the one carried out by Davidson, Suppes, and Siegel in 1954. Both experiments relied on expected utility theory (EUT), and both...