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Session on The Foundations of Revealed Preference
k e y n o t e s e s s i o n s 2011
cemmap Chair: Richard Blundell, Tuesday 18.00 – 19.30
President of the RES, UCL and IFS Location: Windsor Auditorium
Paul Samuelson first described the notion of revealed preference in “A note on the pure theory
of consumer’s behavior” (Economica, 1938).,. His <strong>papers</strong> stimulated a large literature devoted to
refinements and extension of this idea. This theoretical works has now led to a literature on the use of
revealed preference analysis for empirical work that is growing rapidly and is doubtless set to expand
further with the recent advances in partial identification and set inference made in econometrics.
The RES and the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (cemmap) are delighted to be holding
a special session on The Foundations of Revealed Preference chaired by the President of the Society
Richard Blundell at which we will hear from the three economists whose contributions have done
most to develop an area which lies at the very heart of our subject: Sydney Afriat, W. Erwin Diewert
and Hal R. Varian.
Sydney Afriat is Visiting Professor in the Università di Siena.. He Graduated in mathematics from
Cambridge, with a period during World War II in the National Physical Laboratory, then completed a
DPhil at Oxford. He went on to work with Richard Stone in the Department of Applied Economics,
Cambridge , 1953-56, and this period initiated his interest in economics. His career has taken him
to positions in economics and mathematics at numerous universities including spells in Jerusalem,
Princeton, Rice, Houston, Yale, Purdue, UNC, Waterloo, Ottawa, Berkeley, Oxford, LSE, Macquarie,
Osaka and Siena.
His main research contributions have been in demand analysis, index numbers, the measurement and
analysis of productivity, general equilibrium, optimisation theory, econometrics, macroeconomics and
dynamics. He is the author of many books and articles to do with mathematics and economics beside
scattered other items.
W Erwin Diewert is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of British
Columbia. His main areas of research are flexible functional forms, duality theory, applied economics
and index number theory. He has played an active role in shaping modern official economic statistics
in Canada and internationally. His contributions in other areas as well to the economics profession
are reflected in the fact that he is a long standing Research Associate of the National Bureau of
Economic Research, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a
Fellow of the World Academy of Productivity Science, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American
Economic Association. He has published 98 journal articles and 122 book chapters.
Hal R. Varian is the Chief Economist at Google. He is also an emeritus professor at UC, Berkeley
in three departments: business, economics, and information management. He is a fellow of the
Guggenheim Foundation, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He was Co-Editor of the American Economic Review from 1987-1990 and holds honorary doctorates
from the University of Oulu, Finland and the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.
Hal Varian has published numerous <strong>papers</strong> in economic theory, industrial organization, financial
economics, econometrics and information economics. He is the author of two major economics
textbooks which have been translated into 22 languages. He is also the co-author of a bestselling
book on business strategy and wrote a monthly column for the New York Times from 2000 to 2007.
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