The problem of measuring utility has frequently been compared with the problem of measuring temperature. This comparison is very apt. Operationally, … - Kenneth Arrow

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The problem of measuring utility has frequently been compared with the problem of measuring temperature. This comparison is very apt. Operationally, the temperature of a body is the volume of a unit mass of a perfect gas placed in contact with it (provided the mass of the gas is small compared with the mass of the body). Why, it might be asked, was not the logarithm of the volume or perhaps the cube root of the volume of the gas used instead? The reason is simply that the general gas equation assumes a particularly simple form when temperature is defined in the way indicated. But there is no deeper significance.

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About Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Joseph Arrow (August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, who was Professor Emeritus of Economics in Stanford, and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972.

Also Known As

Birth Name: Kenneth Joseph Arrow
Alternative Names: Kenneth J. Arrow Ken Arrow

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Additional quotes by Kenneth Arrow

The slippery role of information as an economic good is of deep significance to economic behavior, especially in the relatively information-rich modern economy. It is an economic good in the traditional sense; it is valuable, and it is costly. But it has a peculiar algebra. Adding one ton of steel to another permits more to be done; repeating the same item of information does not add anything useful. On the other hand, supplying a ton of steel to another reduces the steel available to the supplier; supplying information to another does not reduce the information available to the supplier.

Gibbard's work was a bombshell. That was very exciting. I didn't know about Satterthwaite's work for a couple of years, but it was very much the same thing. I had taken the liberty of abstracting from manipulability in my thesis and I never went back to that issue. What's surprising is not really that there is an impossibility of non-manipulability, but that the issues should be essentially the same. That strikes one as a remarkable coincidence.

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The terms of trade with the outside world should not be regarded as freely given to the firm. In a world with a large number of commodities, even knowing the prices of relevant commodities involves the costly acquisition of certain kinds of information.

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