Thinking Outside the Box: Edgeworth, Pareto and the Early History of the Box Diagram

This paper shows that the ‘Edgeworth box’ diagram, as presented in textbooks, was not devised by Francis Ysidro Edgeworth but by Vilfredo Pareto. The scholarly literature on the derivation of the box diagram published over the last thirty years has continued to attribute the diagram to Edgeworth, textbooks have implied the same attribution when noting that it is named after Edgeworth. This new history of the Edgeworth box diagram, however, provides teachers with a basis for overviewing the derivation of the Edgeworth box when introducing their students to that diagram.