Robert Giffen, 1837-1910, was a Scottish economist and statistician who also had a great reputation in the fields of finance and taxation. He also participated in the editing process in numerous publication, such as the Daily News, The Economist and The Times. However, Robert Giffen is mostly known for giving name to the concept Giffen goods.

It was Alfred Marshall who, in the third edition of his “Principles of Economics”,1895, wrote:

“As Mr. Giffen has pointed out, a rise in the price of bread makes so large a drain on the resources of the poorer labouring families and raises so much the marginal utility of money to them, that they are forced to curtail their consumption of meat and the more expensive farinaceous foods: and, bread being still the cheapest food which they can get and will take, they consume more, and not less of it.”

In other words, Giffen goods are those inferior goods whose demand moves in the same direction as the price variation. This meaning, raising the price of the good will increase its demand.

Abram Bergson, 1914-2003, was an American economist that worked for many governmental and federal agencies including the Russian Economic subdivision of the Office of Strategic Services. He was also a professor at Columbia University, Texas and Harvard. His main area of research was welfare economics but he also provided a lot of research and studies of the Soviet Union economy, marked by a combination of encyclopaedic knowledge of Soviet statistics, theoretical analysis and immense industry knowledge.

Concerning welfare economics, in Bergson’s famous paper “A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics”, 1938, he defined and discussed the concept of an individualistic social welfare function. This function enables the necessary conditions for an economic optimum to be calculated without the assumption of cardinal utility. Furthermore, the function is used as a way to prioritise and establish an order of preference between different situations that meet the requirements of Vilfredo Pareto for social optima. Bergson postulated the need to explicitly accept judgments of value as a way to develop indifference functions. This concept was subsequently utilised and developed by Paul Samuelson and became an integral part of the welfare economics literature.

Roy Forbes Harrod, 1900-1978, was an English economist, friend and a follower of John Maynard Keynes. He published a wide variety of economic papers, many of which were on economic growth, but he also conducted research on currency and inflation. In addition, he also wrote about memory and the theory of knowledge, reflecting on probability as a limitation to induction. Through his works underlines a dynamic view of the economy, more sophisticated and realistic, therefore, than the static view of most theorists.

However, Harrod is best known for his work “The life of John Maynard Keynes”, 1951, a biography of his fellow. He is also known for developing what is nowadays known as the Harrod–Domar model that was initially proposed by him in 1939 and later developed independently by Evsey Domar. This theory was a pioneering mathematical model about the dynamics of economic growth that laid the foundations of the economic growth theory after World War II.

Richard George Lipsey is a Canadian economist born in 1928, who has been Professor at Simon Fraser University for most of his academic career. He has also held professorial posts at the London School of Economics, Essex University and Queen’s University in Kingston, as well as visiting professorships at Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, Manchester, and the University of British Columbia.

Richard Lipsey is mostly known for his article, co-authored with Kelvin Lancaster “The General Theory of Second Best”, 1956, in which they postulated the theory of second best, which aims at finding an optimum when Pareto optimality cannot be found. The main idea in their article is that, when a constraint prevents the fulfilment of one of the conditions required to obtain an optimum equilibrium, the other conditions are in general no longer desirable. The optimum situation in this case can be attained only by neglecting the other conditions. Indeed, this new optimum is called “second best” because a Paretian optimum cannot be attained.

Other of his notorious contributions to economic science includes expanding on the mathematics concerning the Phillip’s curve as well as carrying out further econometrical tests. However, for the most part of his career, Richard Lipsey has centred his work on welfare economics, especially on the analysis of positive economics.

Merton Howard Miller, 1923-2000, was an American economist who taught at the London School of Economics, Carnegie Mellon University and lastly, and for most of his career, at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He also worked as public director on the Chicago Board of Trade (1983-1985) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from 1990 until his death.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize of Economic Sciences in 1990 along with Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe for their work in the financial theory of economics. As stated by the Sveriges Riksbank, which awards the prize, Miller, Sharpe and Markowitz were awarded the prize  “for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics”.

Merton Miller’s largest contribution to the financial field was the Modigliani-Miller theorem, formulated along with Franco Modigliani, and which demonstrates that under certain conditions, a firm´s value will remain unchanged, independently of whether equity or debt financing is used. Miller and Modigliani addressed this topic in his article “The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance and the Theory of Investment”, 1958

Harold Hotelling, 1895-1973, was an American statistician and an important economic theorist. He was Associate Professor at Stanford University and Professor at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Amongst his pupils we can highlight Kenneth Arrow and Milton Friedman. His greatest contribution was to the monopolistic competition field.

Harold Hotelling developed in his article “Stability in Competition”, 1929, what is known nowadays as the Hotelling model or linear city model, which greatly contributed to the field of product differentiation. In this model he introduced the notions of locational equilibrium in a duopoly in which two firms have to choose their location taking into consideration consumers’ distribution and transportation costs. The Hotelling model has been source of inspiration for a great amount of fruitful literature which does not only constrain to industrial organization theory but also to other sciences, such as politics, as some of its conclusion can be directly applied to them.