Orris Clemens Herfindahl (June 15, 1918 in

Parshall, North Dakota Parshall (Hidatsa: ''dibiarugareesh'') is a city lying within the jurisdictional boundaries of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. It is located on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in Mountrail County, North Dakota, United States. The po ...

- December 16, 1972 while traveling in Nepal) was an economist who studied natural resources. However, he is mainly known as the inventor of a concentration index (the Herfindahl index) which he proposed in his 1950 doctoral dissertation on the steel industry while at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

. In fact a similar index (with the addition of a square root) was proposed earlier (in 1945) by

Albert O. Hirschman Albert Otto Hirschman (born ''Otto-Albert Hirschmann''; April 7, 1915 – December 10, 2012) was a German economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology. His first major contribution was in the area of de ...

. Thus, it is usually referred to as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index.

Publications

* ''Economic theory of natural resources'' * ''Natural Resources Information for Economic Development'' * ''Copper Costs and Prices: 1870-1957'' - study of copper, sometimes seen as a

bellwether A bellwether is a leader or an indicator of trends.bellwether
" ''Cambridge Dictionary''. Ret ...

of global activity.

References

1918 births 1972 deaths 20th-century American economists Columbia University alumni {{US-economist-stub