Author: Paul Anthony Samuelson

Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : M.I.T. Press

Published: 1966

Total Pages: 954

ISBN-13:

It is a measure of Professor Samuelson's preeminence that the sheer scale of his work should be so much taken for granted, observes a reviewer in the Economist who goes on to note that a cynic might add that it would have been better for Professor Samuelson to write less merely to give others a chance to write at all. When Professor Samuelson was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory... {Samuelson's] extensive production, covering nearly all areas of economic theory, is characterized by an outstanding ability to derive important new theorems, and to find new applications for existing ones." In 1966, The MIT Press published the first two volumes of The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, edited by joseph E. Stiglitz. These books contain virtually all of Professor Samuelson's contributions to economic theory through mid-1964 - a total of 129 papers collected from economic journals and books on current problems and including his classic articles on such topics as revealed preference, factor price equalization, and public goods, as well as articles that were privately circulated or buried in Festschriften, such as "Market Maximization" and "The Structure of Minimal Equilibrium Systems." Volume 3 contains 77 articles covering the period from mid-1964 to October 1971. Chapters are arranged in the manner of Volumes 1 and 2 - according to subject matter rather than chronologically and under the 18 section titles indicated by Stiglitz, plus an additional one. Characteristically, Professor Samuelson has moved on to an entirely new area - that of portfolio selection and warrant pricing theory, which includes the following articles: "Proof that Properly Anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly" - "Rational Theory of Warrant Pricing that Maximizes Utility" - "General Proof that Diversification Pays" - "Efficient Portfolio Selection for Pareto-Levy Investments" - "The Fundamental Approximation Theorem of Portfolio Analysis in Terms of Means, Variances, and Higher Moments" - "Lifetime Portfolio Selection by Dynamic Stochastic Programming" - "Stochastic Speculative Price" - "The 'Fallacy' of Maximizing the Geometric Mean in Long Sequences of Investing and Gambling"