----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]