Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit impulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments, in contrast, are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently,...

The paper investigates Dennis Robertson's effort to defend the Cambridge utilitarian tradition against the “new welfare economics”, developed in the 1930s and 1940s on the basis of Lionel Robbins's influential criticism of the scientific legitimacy of interpersonal comparisons of utility. It...

Italian abstract: Derivazione del surplus del consumatore e del produttore in contesto di variabili continue e discrete.English abstract: Derivation of consumer and producer surplus in the continuous and discrete case

The idea that consumers are rational decision makers, who carefully consider options when making a decision about a certain phenomenon, will soon phase out! Believe it or not. In a bid to better understand the consumer, a myriad of economists still waste their precious time on “not-so-deep”...

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

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explanations of demand in Marshallian economics in the light of some fresh evidence provided by Sraffa's unpublished manuscripts of the 1920s.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...

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...

Portuguese Abstract: Exploramos vários jogos diferenciais para simular a competição entre duas firmas em Preço, Publicidade, e Preço e Publicidade simultâneamente. Os resultados reforçam conclusões importantes na literatura e complementam-na, permitindo analisar a competição em dois...

A new microeconomic model is presented that aims at a description of the long-term unit sales and price evolution of homogeneous non-durable goods in polypoly markets. It merges the product lifecycle approach with the price dispersion dynamics of homogeneous goods. The model predicts a minimum...

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...