Hermann Heinrich Gossen

Fifty years after Jeremy Bentham’s initial defention of utility, the German economist Hermann Heinrich Gossen introduced the term marginal utility and the law of diminishing marginal utility. The term marginal utility is defined as “the pleasure or pain from an additional unit or ‘dose’ of a good.” The introduction of marginal utility to economic thought and vocabulary was revolutionary, reducing the need to measure total pleasure or pain because “Even if marginal utilities were measured on a cardinal