Cooter Rappoport

Were the Ordinalists Wrong About Welfare Economics?

Author(s): Robert Cooter and Peter Rappoport

Source: Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 507-530

THE DEVELOPMENT of utility theory has

experienced two definitive episodes:

the "marginalist revolution" of the 1870s

and the "Hicksian" or "ordinalist revolution"

of the 1930s. While the first event

established a central place for utility theory

in economics, the second restricted

the concept of utility acceptable to economics.

The term "ordinalist revolution"

refers to the rejection of cardinal notions

of utility and to the general acceptance

of the position that utility was not comparable

across individuals. The purpose

of this paper is to analyze the events

comprising the ordinalist revolution with

a view to determining whether they

achieved the advances in economic science

usually claimed for them.