ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Experimental Indifference Curves and the Ordinalist Revolution
Author: Lenfant Jean-Sébastien
The development of ordinalism has been associated with the idea to dispense with psychological arguments and to build the whole theory the consumer upon indifference curves. From the outset, with Pareto and Fisher, the nature of indifference curves has been a question of the theory. The exact nature of indifference curves for the theory of choice was never dealt with before the thirties, in the USA. An experiment by the psychologist Louis Leon Thurstone was then the starting point for some clarifications about the role of experimental economics for the new theory of the consumer. The aim of the article is to throw some light on the in and outs of this episode of the ordinalist revolution. I concentrate both on Thurstone objectives through his experiment and on the reception of his results in the community of economists. My thesis is that Thurstone experiment was unfit to help theoreticians to cope with the theoretical and methodological stakes of the theory of choice.
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