[2][page needed] Francis Beaufort Edgeworth, when "a restless philosophy student at Cambridge on his way to Germany", had met Rosa, a teenage Spanish refugee, on the steps of the British Museum, and they subsequently eloped.

The youngest of seven children, Edgeworth did not attend school, but was educated by private tutors at the Edgeworthstown estate until he reached the age to enter university.

He developed utility theory, introducing the indifference curve and the famous Edgeworth box, which is now familiar to undergraduate students of microeconomics.

In the book, he criticised Jevons's theory of barter exchange, showing that under a system of "recontracting" there will be, in fact, many solutions, an "indeterminacy of contract".

He frequently referenced literary sources and interspersed the writing with passages in a number of languages, including Latin, French and Ancient Greek.

In the limit case of an infinite number of agents (perfect competition), the set of possible contract becomes fully determinate and identical to the 'equilibrium' of economists.

The only way of resolving this indeterminacy of contract would be to appeal to the utilitarian principle of maximising the sum of the utilities of traders over the range of final settlements.

He set the utilitarian foundations for highly progressive taxation, arguing that the optimal distribution of taxes should be such that 'the marginal disutility incurred by each taxpayer should be the same' (Edgeworth, 1897).

At the same time, Edgeworth showed how price competition between two firms with capacity constraints and/or rising marginal cost curves resulted in indeterminacy.