Orris C. Herfindahl
American economist / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Orris Clemens Herfindahl (June 15, 1918 in Parshall, North Dakota - December 16, 1972 while traveling in Nepal[1]) 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.[2][3][4] In fact a similar index (with the addition of a square root) was proposed earlier (in 1945) by Albert O. Hirschman.[5] Thus, it is usually referred to as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index.