Ivan Moscati Wins Award for Best Article in History of Economic Thought

THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, ASSIGNED BY THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT, GOES TO AN ARTICLE ON THE EXPECTED UTILITY THEORY

Ivan Moscati, a Professor affiliated with Bocconi’s Department of Economics, won the ESHET 2018 History of Economic Analysis Award, assigned by the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) to the best article in history of economic thought published in a scientific journal in the two previous years.
 
The awarded article, How Economists Came to Accept Expected Utility Theory: The Case of Samuelson and Savage (in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30: 219-36) is based on the correspondence among Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, Leonard Jimmie Savage, and Jacob Marschak in the early ‘50s. It explores the joint intellectual journey that led Samuelson to accept the expected utility theory, which he had attacked in three papers, and Savage to revise his motivations for supporting it.
 
The article is part of a research program that led to the publication of the forthcoming book Measuring Utility. From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics, New York, Oxford University Press.
 
Prof. Moscati had already been awarded by the other major international of thought of economic history, the History of Economics Society, for his Early Experiments in Consumer Demand Theory: 1930-1970 (in History of Political Economy, 39: 359-401).
 
Ivan Moscati is an Associate Professor at Università dell’Insubria.

by Fabio Todesco