Hermann Heinrich Gossen (7 September 1810 – 13 February 1858) was a German economist who is often regarded as the first to elaborate, in detail, a general theory of marginal utility.
Prior to Gossen, a number of economic theorists, including Gabriel Cramer,[1]Daniel Bernoulli,[2]William Forster Lloyd,[3]Nassau William Senior,[4] and Jules Dupuit[5] had employed or asserted the significance of some notion of marginal utility. But Cramer, Bernoulli, and Dupuit had focussed upon specific problems, Lloyd had not presented any applications of theory, and if Senior provided a detailed elaboration of the general theory he had developed,[6] he had done so in language that caused his applications of theory to be missed by most readers.
^Bernoulli, Daniel (1738). "Specimen theoriae novae de mensura sortis" [Exposition of a new theory on the measurement of risk]. Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae [Memoirs of the Imperial Academy of Science at St. Petersburg] (in Latin and French). 5: 175–192.; English translation: Bernoulli, Daniel (January 1954). "Exposition of a new theory on the measurement of risk". Econometrica. 22 (1): 23–36. doi:10.2307/1909829. JSTOR1909829. S2CID9165746.
^Lloyd, William Forster; Lectures on Population, Value, Poor Laws and Rent (1837).
^Dupuit, Jules (1844). "De la mesure de l'utilité des travaux publics" [On the measure of the utility of public works]. Annales des ponts et chaussées (in French). 8 (2): 332–375.
English translation: Dupuit, Jules (1952). "On the measure of utility of public works". International Economic Papers. 2. Translated by Barback, R.M.: 83–100.
^White, Michael V; “Diamonds Are Forever(?): Nassau Senior and Utility Theory” in The Manchester School of Economic & Social Studies 60 (1992) #1 (March).