Naming things after each other
Published:
I have recently read the article “Why Mathematicians Should Stop Naming Things After Each Other”. The same logic seems to apply to economics.
A long time ago when I read McKenzie’s paper “On Equilibrium in Graham’s Model of World Trade and Other Competitive Systems”, my first impression was that the title was bad. It does not say what properties of equilibrium the paper is about; the paper has nothing to do with international trade; but above all, I had no idea what “Graham’s model” meant. Maybe Graham was well-known in the 1940s, but I wonder how many economists remember him now.
One lesson may be that if we want our papers to be still readable in the distant future, we should not use concepts named after people, unless the names are already very well established such as Nash equilibrium or Pareto distribution. Instead of Bewley-Huggett-Aiyagari model (or any subset of these names), we should use “heterogeneous-agent model”; instead of Krusell-Smith model, we should use “heterogeneous-agent model with aggregate risk”, etc. But if we insist on this direction, we would have to use “recursive preferences with constant relative risk aversion and constant elasticity of intertemporal substitution” instead of Epstein-Zin preferences, which may be too long. (If so we may perhaps use “CES (constant elasticity of substitution) recursive preferences”.)