Disciplinary provenance shaped whether Sharpe’s model counted as economics.

Evidence

Sharpe’s development of Markowitz’s “underlying factor” model could still be seen as operations research rather than economics: it was published in Management Science (Sharpe 1963) rather than in an economics journal. At root, though, Sharpe was an economist, and Armen Alchian had taught him microeconomics-the foundational part of the discipline that studies how production and consumption decisions by rational firms and individuals shape market prices, giving rise to equilibrium in competitive markets. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 234

Categorization

• XREF: Disciplinary boundary-drawing over which models count as economics connects to science-studies literature on boundary work (Gieryn).