American economist who was one of the pioneers of modern academic economics in the United States.

After an interruption of university studies because of illness in his family, Fetter graduated from Indiana University in 1891 and from Cornell University in 1892. He subsequently studied in France and Germany, receiving his Ph.D. (on population) from the University of Halle (1894). After appointments at Cornell, Indiana, and Stanford universities, he became professor at Princeton University in 1911.

Fetter maintained his European connections, notably with the Austrian economists Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser, and was perhaps the leading American exponent of the “Austrian school,” with its emphasis upon a structure of economic theory based on psychological assumptions about the subjective behaviour of the maximizing individual. Although Fetter was widely known for his theoretical and practical work on industrial monopoly, his major theoretical contributions involved the development of a capital theory that emphasized time preference rather than physical productivity and a distribution theory based upon a generalization of the rent concept. He was also personally active in social work and was a strong advocate of academic freedom. Fetter was a distinguished historian of economic thought and the father of another distinguished economic historian, Frank Whitson Fetter.