Profile Major Works Resources

Giovanni Battista Antonelli, 1858-1944.

Italian engineer and contributor to the Lausanne School (no relation to his comrade-in-arms, Etienne Antonelli

Giovanni Antonelli was raised in Pisa to a family of Corsican refugees.  After acquiring his degree in mathematics at Pisa in 1883, Antonelli went on to study engineering at Milan.  He proceeded to have a distinguished career in civil engineering, particularly in port facilities, helping design those of Genoa, Naples and Monaco.

Like many other engineer-economists, Antonelli's interest in economics was brief and primarily technical.  His privately circulated 1886 manuscript, intended as an introductory chapter to a larger work, was a tremendous solitary contribution to nascent mathematical economics.  Antonelli was probably the first to pose the "integrability" problem of deducing utility from a demand function, and showing the symmetry conditions that must be obeyed by an indirect demand function.

The integrability question was raised again (and independently) twenty years later by Volterra in his review of Pareto's Manuale and led to flurry of work on the issue. Curiously, Pareto himself had probably read Antonelli as early as 1891, having been lent a copy of his monograph by Maffeo Pantaleone, but didn't make use of it or cite it in his own work.  Antonelli's own piece remained obscure until the 1940s, when it was resurrected by Herman Wold and Paul Samuelson.

Antonelli also set out conditions by which one can derive properly-behaved market demand functions by the aggregation of individual demand functions - specifically, noting that market demand is properly-behaved and independent of the distribution of income if and only if every consumer has the identical preferences and these preferences are homothetic. Antonelli's aggregation theorem was independently rediscovered by William Gorman (1953) and A. Nataf (1953). 

 

  


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Major Works of Giovanni B. Antonelli

  • Sulla teoria matematica della economia politica, 1886. (monograph; first pub. 1951, Giornale degli economisti; transl. as "On the Mathematical Theory of Political Economy", 1971, Chipman et al. Preferences, Utility and Demand )
  • Sui Sistemi articolati, 1887
  • Progetto di ampliamento del Porto di Genova e dei relativi impianti, 1900
  • Proposta di una galleria sottomarina fra il molo vecchio ed il Ponte Biagio Assareto, 1900
  • I porti concorrenti di Genova, 1901
  • Modificazioni al piano regolatore della Spezia, 1916
  • "Sistemazione del Porto della Spezia tenendo conto dei bisogni delle industrie", 1916, Il Monitore Tecnico
  • Ferrovia economica Genova-Piacenza: schema del progetto, 1917
  • Porto ai bottenighi nella laguna di Venezia, 1917
  • Proposta di allacciamento ferroviario delle nuove calate del Porto di Genova coi valichi ferroviari, 1925
  • L'ammortamento obbligatorio del capitale ("The Compulsory Amortization of Capital"), 1935.

HET

 

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Resources on G.B. Antonelli

  • "Antonelli, G.B." by Nereo Salvi, at Treccani.it
  • "Solving the Index-Number problem in a Historical Perspective", by Carlo Milana, 2010 (pdf)
  • Wiki

 

 
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