Measuring Utility: From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics
Measuring Utility: From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics
Associate Professor of Economics
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Abstract
The book reconstructs the history of utility measurement in economics, from the marginal revolution of the 1870s to the beginning of behavioral economics in the mid-1980s. Part I covers 1870–1910 and discusses the issue of utility measurement in the theories of Jevons, Menger, Walras, and other early utility theorists. Part II deals with the emergence of the notions of ordinal and cardinal utility during 1900–1945 and discusses two early attempts to give an empirical content to the notion of utility. Part III focuses on the 1945–1955 debate on utility measurement originated by von Neumann and Morgenstern’s expected utility theory (EUT). Part IV reconstructs the experimental attempts to measure the utility of money between 1950 and 1985 within the framework provided by EUT. The book does four main things. First, it reconstructs in detail economists’ ideas and discussions about utility measurement from 1870 to 1985 and their attempts to measure utility empirically. Second, it brings into focus the interplay among the evolution of utility analysis, economists’ ideas about utility measurement, and their conception of what measurement in general means. Third, it explores the hitherto underresearched relationships among the history of utility measurement in economics, the history of the measurement of sensations in psychology, and the history of measurement theory in general. Finally, it discusses some methodological problems related to utility measurement, such as the epistemological status of the utility concept and its measures. The book closes with a brief overview of post-1985 research trends in utility measurement.
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Front Matter
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Prologue
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Part One Utility Measurement in Early Utility Theories, 1870–1910
Ivan Moscati-
chapter 1
When Unit-Based Measurement Ruled the World: An Interdisciplinary Overview, 1870–1910
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chapter 2
Is There a Unit of Utility? Jevons, Menger, and Walras on the Measurability of Utility, 1870–1910
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chapter 3
Still on the Quest for a Unit: Utility Measurement in Wieser, Böhm-Bawerk, Edgeworth, Fisher, and Marshall, 1880–1910
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chapter 1
When Unit-Based Measurement Ruled the World: An Interdisciplinary Overview, 1870–1910
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Part Two Ordinal and Cardinal Utility and Early Empirical Measurements of Utility, 1900–1945
Ivan Moscati-
chapter 4
Fundamental Measurement, Sensation Differences, and the British Controversy on Psychological Measurement, 1910–1940
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chapter 5
Ordinal Utility: Pareto and the Austrians, 1900–1915
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chapter 6
Cardinal Utility: How It Entered Economic Analysis from Pareto to Samuelson, 1915–1945
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chapter 7
Going Empirical: The Econometric and Experimental Approaches to Utility Measurement of Frisch and Thurstone, 1925–1945
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chapter 4
Fundamental Measurement, Sensation Differences, and the British Controversy on Psychological Measurement, 1910–1940
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Part Three From Debating Expected Utility Theory to Redefining Utility Measurement, 1945–1955
Ivan Moscati-
chapter 8
Stevens and the Operational Definition of Measurement in Psychology, 1935–1950
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chapter 9
The Expected Utility Theory and Measurement Theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944–1947von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944
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chapter 10
What Is That Function? Friedman, Savage, Marschak, Samuelson, and Baumol on EUT, 1947–1950
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chapter 11
From Chicago to Paris: The Debate Continues, 1950–1952
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chapter 12
Conventions, Operations, Predictions: Redefining Utility Measurement, 1952–1955
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chapter 8
Stevens and the Operational Definition of Measurement in Psychology, 1935–1950
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Part Four Expected Utility Theory and Experimental Utility Measurement, 1950–1985
Ivan Moscati-
chapter 13
Experimental Utility Measurement: The Age of Confidence I, 1950–1960
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chapter 14
Marschak and Utility Measurement at Yale: The Age of Confidence II, 1960–1965
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chapter 15
From Utility Measurement to the Representational Theory of Measurement: The Case of Suppes, 1950–1970
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chapter 16
Measuring Utility, Destabilizing EUT: Behavioral Economics Begins, 1965–1985
- Epilogue
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chapter 13
Experimental Utility Measurement: The Age of Confidence I, 1950–1960
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End Matter
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