Alfred Marshall
Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) was a British economist whose synthesis of supply, demand, and marginal utility helped establish neoclassical economics.
Marginal utility: The additional satisfaction gained from consuming one more unit of a good. Marshall used marginal utility to explain consumer demand and diminishing willingness to pay.
Mary Paley Marshall: A British economist and coauthor of an early economics textbook with Alfred Marshall. Their collaboration produced the 1879 text that introduced economics to new students.
Classical economics: A tradition of economic thought associated with writers such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. Marshall retained classical concerns with production and costs while revising their account of value.
Principles of Economics: Alfred Marshall’s textbook, first published in 1890, that presented his mature economic framework. This work contains his best-known treatments of markets, firms, and economic time.
Neoclassical economics: A tradition that explains economic outcomes through individual choice, marginal analysis, and market interaction. Marshall became one of its principal architects by combining marginal reasoning with classical analysis.
Supply and demand: A model of how buyers’ demand and sellers’ supply jointly determine market prices and quantities. Marshall made their interaction central to explaining market prices.
John Maynard Keynes: A British economist whose theories reshaped macroeconomics and economic policy. Keynes studied under Marshall at Cambridge before developing a distinct economic framework.
Marginalism: An approach that explains choices and value through changes at the margin of economic activity. Marshall’s work formed part of the marginalist shift that transformed economic theory.
Industrial organization: The study of how firms, market structure, and competition shape economic outcomes. Marshall analyzed how firm size, industry structure, and competition influence production costs.
Economics as a discipline: The social science that studies production, distribution, exchange, and consumption under scarcity. Marshall helped establish economics as a distinct academic discipline through teaching and textbooks.