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Dear fellow HES subscribers,
I am trying to pursue the history of the ideas in the word "strategic" in
economic thought and discourse before the rise of deliberate "game theory."
My main interest is in the use of the word in discussions of disputes
between capital and labor; on this side I think I have come to rest. On the
use of the word for disputes among firms I am not yet satisfied. Right now
I am trying to discover why Ragnar Frisch in an article eventually famous,
"Monopole-Polypole-La Notion de force dans l'economie," published in a
Festschrift for Harald Westergaard in 1933, used the word "strategic,"
which he had never used before and (so far as I can tell) would never use
later, in any connection, to describe different "types" of "polypolistic
situations." I have searched all the intellectual influences on him that he
ever mentioned (Jevons, Marshall, Irving Fisher, Henry L. Moore, Henry
Schultz, Tinbergen, Jakob Marschak, Erich Schneider, Leontief, Umberto
Ricci, Luigi Amoroso, Charles Roos, Mitchell, Hotelling, Keynes, Zeuthen,
and a few others), other sources that he cited in economics and statistics,
and the sources of some of the influences on him (Cournot, Gibbs, et al.),
and found almost nothing. My only connection so far is from Pigou on
"bilateral monopoly," which Zeuthen cites in a footnote in 1930, although
without mention of "strategic," and Frisch, who very probably had read
everything of Pigou's, never cited this article or Zeuthen's reference to
it.
Let me add that while Frisch's meaning of "strategic" is not (I think)
quite clear, there is no sign he owed the word to anyone in the Vienna
Circle.
Can anyone of you enlighten me as to the source from which he did draw the
word, or suggest any evidence that it was his own brainstorm to use it?
Thank you in advance for any help.
Yours,
J. Womack
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