Dictionary :: People

Glossary of game theory terms.

Pareto, Vilfredo

Vilfredo Pareto
Pareto was an Italian economist who lived from 1848 to 1923. He argued that an individual's preferences were the beginning pointof economic analysis, and only ordinal and not cardinal payoffs were important. Keeping with this, he developed the notion of a Pareto optimal outcome in which no member of society can be made better off without hurting, or decreasing the payoffs of someone else.

updated: 12 August 2005
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