Department of Economics. University of Melbourne. Parkville Victoria 3052 Australia
ABSTRACT
This paper traces the discovery of the Cobb-Douglas function. There were four antecedents to Cobb and Douglas; von Thunen, Mill, Pareto and Wicksell. The demand functions specified by Mill and Pareto implied the Cobb-Douglas utility function and von Thunen and Wicksell stated the Cobb-Douglas production function explicitly. This paper comments on why this function has played a seminal role in production and utility theory and why it has been discovered independently by several authors. The device used to answer these questions is a characterization of the function in terms of certain properties. Other functional forms have been devised in a similar way by seeking functions with specified properties.
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