哈羅德·霍特林1895年9月29日出生在美國明尼蘇達的福達，他原本在華盛頓大學主修新聞學，但後來轉向數學作拓撲領域之相關研究，並於1924年獲得博士學位。霍特林起初服務於史丹福大學，他對統計理論最重要的貢獻是多變數分析及或然率，最重要的論文則是 《The generalization of Student's ratio》，即目前著稱的霍特林T方(Hotelling's T2 )。 他在主成分分析 (principal components analysis)和正準相關(canonical correlations)的發展上也扮演重要的角色。 1972年他被選為美國國家科學研究院的院士， 1973年被選為羅馬 Academia Nazionale dei Lincei。 1973年12月26日，卒於北卡羅來納的教堂山。
Harold Hotelling's articles on econoimcs were few, but his contributions were profound enough to make him one of the "leaders" of the Paretian School, the "resurrectors" the Marginalist Revolution in the 1930s.
Hotelling's 1929 paper on the stability of competition introduced the notion of spatial competition in a duopoly situation. The solution to this problem was in fact an early statement of a very well-known game-theoretic solution concept: the subgame-perfect equilibrium (as later defined by Selten.). His 1929 paper on depreciation provided its modern definition as the decline in discounted future values. In 1931, he advanced another technique into economics, the calculus of variations, into a now famous analysis of resource exhaustion.
His 1932 piece reworked the theory of production into a choice-theoretic framework based on profit-maximization, setting the foundations of the modern Neoclassical approach. His 1935 derivation of demand was actually simultaneous with that of Hicks and Allen. His famous 1938 presidential address to the Econometric Society introduced the "marginal cost pricing" equilibrium as a general welfare proposition: roughly, that economic efficiency is achieved if every good is produced and priced at marginal cost. This would be the foundation of the Fundamental Welfare Theorems of Paretian general equilibrium theory. It was also here that he introduced his famous "two-part" tariff as an alternative solution in situations of natural monopoly.
Although appointed as a professor of economics at Columbia (oddly, one of the strongholds of the American Institutionalist school), one can argue that Harold Hotelling was a statistician first, economist second. His work in mathematical statistics included his famous 1931 paper on the Student's t distribution for hypothesis testing, in which he laid out what has since been called "confidence intervals". At Columbia, he ensured that the economics students under him were well immersed in statistical theory. He trained both Kenneth Arrow and Milton Friedman, and was instrumental in the appointment of Abraham Wald.
工作
"A General Mathematical Theory of Depreciation", 1925, Journal of ASA. "Differential Equations Subject to Error", 1927, Journal of ASA "Applications of the Theory of Error to the Interpretation of Trends", with H. Working, 1929, Journal of ASA. "Stability in Competition", 1929, EJ. "The Economics of Exhaustible Resources", 1931, JPE. "The Generalization of Student's Ratio", 1931, Annals of Mathematical Statistics. "Edgeworth's Taxation Paradox and the Nature of Supply and Demand Functions", 1932, JPE. "Analysis of a Complex of Statistical Variables with Principal Components",1933, J of Educational Psychology "Demand Functions with Limited Budgets", 1935, Econometrica. "Relation Between Two Sets of Variates", 1936, Biometrika. "The General Welfare in Relation to Problems of Taxation and of Railway and Utility Rates", 1938, Econometrica.
參考資料：
Kenneth J. Arrow, 1987, “Hotelling ,Harold" The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 2, pp. 670–71.I. Olkina and A. R. Sampsonb (2001). "Hotelling, Harold (1895–1973)," International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, pp. 6921–6925. Abstract.
