William Vickrey var nog den första att formulera idén om ”behind the veil of ignorance”. Här är ett citat från Richard Arnotts artikel ”Vickrey, William Spencer (1914–1996)” i The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2008:
”Vickrey made several other contributions to the literature on social choice and resource allocation mechanisms. In ‘Measuring Marginal Utility by Reactions to Risk’ (1945), he provided the first statement of social choice based on the maximization of expected utility behind the veil of ignorance, which was independently stated by Harsanyi (1955) a decade later […]”.
