Journal Article A Note on Measurement of Utility Get access Paul A. Samuelson Paul A. Samuelson Cambridge, Mass. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 1937, Pages 155–161, https://doi.org/10.2307/2967612 Published: 01 February 1937

Paul A. Samuelson, Limited Liability, Short Selling, Bounded Utility, and Infinite-Variance Stable Distributions, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Sep., 1976), pp. 485-503

“Don't put all your eggs in one basket, ” is a familiar adage. Economists, such as Marschak, Markowitz, and Tobin, who work only with mean income and its variance, can give specific content to this rule—namely, putting a fixed total of wealth equally into independently, identically distributed investments will leave the mean gain unchanged and will minimize the variance.

The Markowitz analysis of efficient portfolio selection, which can be interpreted as solving the quadratic-programming problem of minimizing the variance of a normal variate subject to each prescribed mean value, easily can be generalized (in the special case of independently distributed investments) to the concave-programming problem of minimizing the “dispersion” of a stable Pareto-Lévy variate subject to each prescribed mean value. Some further generalizations involving interdependent distributions will also be presented here.

Journal Article Justice to the Australians Get access Paul A. Samuelson Paul A. Samuelson Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 96, Issue 1, February 1981, Pages 169–170, https://doi.org/10.2307/2936147 Published: 01 February 1981

Journal Article Summing up on the Australian Case for Protection Get access Paul A. Samuelson Paul A. Samuelson Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 96, Issue 1, February 1981, Pages 147–160, https://doi.org/10.2307/2936145 Published: 01 February 1981

Introduction, 519.—Truth lost, and found, 520.—Graphical depiction, 522.—The error corrected, 524.—Conclusion, 525.—Mathematical appendix, 525.

Early syntheses, 27. — The scholar reborn, 29. — Conclusion, 31.

Nature of a pitfall, 41.—Substantive vindication— 43.—Deeper issue of nonsteady-state analysis, 45.

Rejoinder Get access Paul A. Samuelson Paul A. Samuelson Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 86, Issue 3, August 1972, Pages 500–503, https://doi.org/10.2307/1880808 Published: 01 August 1972