One of the hardiest and most widely cited results in all of economics, Pareto efficiency, was developed by Vilfredo Pareto in “The Maximum of Utility Given by Free Competition,” an article published in Giornale degli Economisti in 1894, and his Manuale d’economia politica, first published in 1906 and revised and translated into French in 1909. Pareto proposed that an allocation or distribution of goods was efficient or optimal if, once attained, any move away from it could not make anyone better off without at the same time making at least one other person worse off. Allocations that are not Pareto optimal allow for redistributions that make at least one person better off while making no one else worse off.

Consideration of Pareto efficiency, the Pareto process, ...