Dupuit's Characteristics-Based Theory of Consumer Behavior and Entrepreneurship.

The French engineer-economist Jules Dupuit (1804-66) fashioned theories of consumer behavior and entrepreneurship that stressed the following propositions: (1) that goods are "bundles" of utility-generating characteristics and (2) that the entrepreneur's job is the dual task of discovering which combinations of characteristics consumers what to buy and then pricing these combinations so as to simultaneously maximize sellers' profits and consumers' utility. Unlike some recent models patterned after K. J. Lancaster, Dupuit's theory of entrepreneurship was not deterministic. He perceived competition in the dynamic sense and emphasized market processes rather than end states. Copyright 1991 by WWZ and Helbing & Lichtenhahn Verlag AG