Revealed Preference after Samuelson

Abstract

The first and fundamental paper of P. A. Samuelson on revealed preference theory (1937) is now almost forty-five years old. He must have been barely twenty when it was written. One feels, nevertheless, that revealed preference has not just been a youthful interest, but has remained very close to his heart. He has written on it repeatedly (e.g., 1948, 1950), it features prominently in his Nobel Laureate lecture, and it was chosen by him as the subject of his 1973 Gibbs lecture at the American Mathematical Society meetings. Revealed preference is as founda-tional and purely theoretical a subject as one can find, and one cannot help thinking that this is part of its fascination. Indeed, of how many topics can it be said that, to paraphrase what Samuelson wrote in the Georgescu-Roegen Festschrift, people will be discussing them a hundred years from now? Certainly, the pure theory of rational choice is one, and I hope that it will be an appropriate appreciation of Samuelson’s contributions if I devote these few pages to giving a nonscholarly and nonex-haustive account of some of the developments that his seminal revealed preference work inspired — to show, in a word, that if one starts the clock in 1937, his prediction has already become almost half fulfilled.