I’ve heard that but I’m not really convinced. First, she did more that monopolistic competition, otherwise she’d probably not be famous enough to warrant a Nobel. Secondly, isn’t it like a Newton/Leibniz argument?

I guess you could uncontroversially say that Ostrom wasn’t the first woman to make a notable contribution to the field of economics. Anyway, this will start to fade as an issue when Duflo and her ilk start picking up Nobels. That will probably make everyone happy 🙂

I have argued that in the past but as I have had to look more into the development of the whole imperfect competition thing I’m not so sure. Mark Blaug point it this way: “Despite superficial similarities between the two books [Robinson’s and Chamberlin’s], it is now perfectly obvious that Chamberlin was the true revolutionary.”