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...

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...

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...

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...

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explanations of demand in Marshallian economics in the light of some fresh evidence provided by Sraffa's unpublished manuscripts of the 1920s.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

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....

Im Folgenden wird untersucht welche Antworten die Wirtschaftswissenschaften auf die Frage geben, welchen Einfluss das Geld in der Gegenwart auf unser Denken und Handeln ausübt. Dabei wird deutlich, dass der Mainstream der Wirtschaftswissenschaften das Geld als einen Denkzwang stets voraussetzt...