Pareto and the Wicksell–Cobb–Douglas Functional Form

Christian Weber

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 1998, vol. 20, issue 2, 203-210

Abstract: It is understood that Charles Cobb and Paul Douglas (1928) were not the first to use the production function named after them. Joseph Schumpeter (1954, p. 1042), Carl-Axel Olsson (1971), and Henry Spiegel (1991, p. 816) all note that the production function Y = AKαL1-α had been used by Knut Wicksell (1901, 1906) more than twenty years before Cobb and Douglas published their study. While it is quite possible that Wicksell was the first to use the Cobb-Douglas functional form to study production, he was not the first to apply it to economic analysis in general. Vilfredo Pareto had worked out several implications of a specific version of the Cobb-Douglas utility function as early as 1892. Later, he repeated and extended this analysis in the mathematical appendix to the French translation of his Manual of Political Economy (1909).

Date: 1998
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