Ugo Pagano (born 1951) is an Italian economist and Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Siena (Italy) where he is also Director of the PhD programme in Economics and President of S. Chiara Graduate School. Biography Pagano graduated with a M.A. from the University of Siena in 1973. Subsequently, he received his PhD in Economics from Cambridge University where he was later to become University Lecturer and Fellow of Pembroke College. Pagano was the President of the Italian Association for the Study of Comparative Economic Systems and member of the Council of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy. He is former founding editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics. Currently, Pagano is Professor of Economic Policy and Director of the PhD programme in Economics at the University of Siena where he teaches courses on Theory of the Firm, Law and Economics and Political Economy. He teaches also at Central European University, Budapest. In 1997 he was awarded the Kapp Prize for the essay 'Transition and the Speciation of the Japanese Model' by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy. Work and research interest In the first part of his career Pagano has challenged the long tradition that sees economics as a relation between means and ends. Within this context his main contribution has been to endogenise the definition of both means and ends, and to clarify that by considering only leisure as argument of the utility function is tantamount to assuming that workers are physical 'things' not different from iron instead of human beings. On the basis of this critique various welfare theorems could be re-stated: the sum of utilities and productivity of work instead of the utility alone have to be equal in each use; the technological efficiency is not any more an essential requirement for economic efficiency; and the maximisation of profit does not any more imply an efficient allocation of work. Following this line of research Pagano has enlarged the standard economic view about scarcity. In addition to standard material scarcity he has taken into account some dimensions usually neglected in mainstream economics among which social and intelligence scarcities. With reference to social scarcity Pagano has suggested a way of integrating the analysis of goods such as prestige and power in economic theory. This has been done by introducing a new type of good – positional goods – which have been defined as having