Introduction

Abstract

In 1952, Professor Sten Malmquist was appointed as an opponent on Dr. Erland von Hoffsten’s doctoral dissertation “Price Indexes and Quality Changes,” Uppsala Universitet. To facilitate his evaluation of this dissertation, Professor Malmquist constructed the now-famous Malmquist quantity index. In the course of formulating the index, Malmquist developed a distance function defined on a consumption space. This function, which is the consumer analog to the Shephard input distance function of producers, was used in ratio form to define the quantity index.