The Giffen Paradox
Some things sell more as the price goes up, and the people buying them are behaving perfectly sensibly.
1895 (Marshall's third edition); 2008 (first credible field evidence)18 min read
British official statistics
Robert Giffen
1837 – 1910
Scottish statistician and economist. He worked as a journalist at The Economist under Walter Bagehot, then headed the statistical department of the Board of Trade, and served as president of the Royal Statistical Society from 1882 to 1884. He was knighted in 1895. He wrote extensively on working-class budgets and on the price of bread, but no passage stating the phenomenon Marshall named after him has ever been located in his published work.