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Indirect Utility Function

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Abstract

After many independent discoveries that were widely separated in time and space, the indirect utility function has in the last 35 years gradually become a standard part of demand theory. Its first discovery was made as early as 1886 by Antonelli in Italy, who also derived what has come to be known as Roy’s Identity (see Chipman’s introduction to the translation of Antonelli (1886) in Chipman et al. 1971). Later contributions came from Konyus (1924, 1926) and Byushgens in Russia, from Hotelling (1932) and Court (1941, pp. 284–97) in the United States, from Roy (1942, 1947) and Ville (1946) in France, and from Wold (1943–4) and Malmquist (1953) in Sweden; a good brief history may be found in Diewert (1982, pp. 547–50).

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Bibliography

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Newman, P. (2018). Indirect Utility Function. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1245

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