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In a series of papers published over the last few years, other scholars and I have investigated the history of the theoretical discussions about the measurability of utility and the practical attempts to measure utility in economics from the marginal revolution to behavioral economics (see e.g. Heukelom 2010; Baccelli & Mongin 2016; Moscati 2013a,b, 2015, 2016a).

In the present paper I take stock of this historical work to discuss four main philosophical issues that have underlain and shaped, typically in an implicit way, the theory and practice of utility measurement in economics. The four issues are as follows:

1) The understanding of measurement: which forms of quantitative assessment of utility do utility theorists consider as actual measurement?

2) The scope of the utility concept: how broadly is the concept of utility defined? And how does the scope of the utility concept affect the approach to utility measurement?

3) The ontological status of utility: does the economic concept of utility refer to some existing mental entity (realist view), or is utility a purely theoretical construct that has proven useful for explaining/predicting some important economic phenomena but does not necessarily have any real mental correlate (anti-realist view)?

4) The data for utility measurement: which kind of data can be legitimately used to measure utility?

The present paper is a history-based exercise in analytical philosophy. In it I make explicit the often-implicit stance that utility theorists took on those four issues from the marginal revolution to the rise of behavioral economics, and discuss how their views about those issues shaped their theories and practices of utility measurement. 

References

Baccelli & Mongin 2016. Choice-based cardinal utility. J. of Economic Methodology.

Heukelom 2010. Measurement and decision making at the University of Michigan in the 1950s and 1960s. J. of the History of Behavioral Science.

Moscati 2013a. Were Jevons, Menger and Walras really cardinalists? HOPE.

Moscati 2013b. How cardinal utility entered economic analysis, 1909-1944. EJHET.

Moscati 2015. Austrian debates on utility measurement, from Menger to Hayek. In R. Leeson (ed), Hayek: A Collaborative Biography, Part IV. New York, Palgrave.

Moscati 2016a. Measuring the Economizing Mind in the 1940s and 1950s. HOPE, annual supplement.

Utility theory; Utility measurement; Measurement theory