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 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...

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explanations of demand in Marshallian economics in the light of some fresh evidence provided by Sraffa's unpublished manuscripts of the 1920s.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

The paper argues that the canonical dichotomy between cardinal utility and ordinal utility is inadequate to tell the history of utility theory, and that a third form of utility consistent with the so-called classical understanding of measurement should be added to the traditional picture....

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

It is widely held that under ordinal utility, utility differences are ill-defined. Allegedly, for these to be well-defined (without turning to choice under risk or the like), one should adopt as a new kind of primitive quaternary relations, instead of the traditional binary relations underlying...

It is conceivable that the whether to buy and how much tobuy decisions in the purchasing process of households areinfluenced by the inventory process. In this paper we thereforeput forward a model for consumption, where we rely on establishedeconomic theory. We incorporate this model in a model...