Ebook: Imperfect General Equilibrium: The Economy as an Evolutionary Process: Individualistic, Discrete, Deterministic
- Tags: Economic Theory
- Series: Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems 415
- Year: 1994
- Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
- Edition: 1
- Language: English
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Economic theory of the last fifty years has been dominated by the paradigm of General Equilibrium Theory, based on the scientific work of Walras-Pareto-Cassel-Wald-Hicks-Arrow-De breu-McKenzie. Some of its grounding assumptions are: all prices are fully flexible; an auctioneer appropriately manipulates all prices according to the law of supply and demand; every con sumer has only one budget constraint; all agents are perfectly informed; no actions are taken by agents before a vector of prices has been found such that all markets clear. Indeed, when all markets clear every agent can implement her/his chosen (opti mal) action and nobody is urged to change his/her decisions. Under these assumptions it is generally said that in a (one pe riod, competitive) general equilibrium model there is no place for money. The present monograph takes general equilibrium as the ba sis on which to build the model presented. But its first aim is to completely dispense with the Walrasian auctioneer by giving firms the task of choosing their output price~ period after period.
The topic of this book is a temporary general disequilibrium with prices chosen by firms, rationing implemented by firms; taxes, public goods and "flat" money issued by a Public Authority. A special feature are the illustrations of time paths for prices and quantities.
This monograph presents a new look at general disequilibrium analysis in calendar time and provides the proof that the economy behaves orderly even without auctioneers.