General equilibrium without utility functions: how far to go?

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

  • Yves Balasko
  • Mich Tvede
How far can we go in weakening the assumptions of the general equilibrium model? Existence of equilibrium, structural stability and finiteness of equilibria of regular economies, genericity of regular economies and an index formula for the equilibria of regular economies have been known not to require transitivity and completeness of consumers' preferences. We show in this paper that if consumers' non-ordered preferences satisfy a mild version of convexity already considered in the literature, then the following properties are also satisfied: (1) the smooth manifold structure and the diffeomorphism of the equilibrium manifold with a Euclidean space; (2) the diffeomorphism of the set of no-trade equilibria with a Euclidean space; (3) the openness and genericity of the set of regular equilibria as a subset of the equilibrium manifold; (4) for small trade vectors, the uniqueness, regularity and stability of equilibrium for two version of tatonnement; (5) the pathconnectedness of the sets of stable equilibria.
Original languageEnglish
JournalEconomic Theory
Volume45
Issue number1-2
Pages (from-to)201-225
Number of pages25
ISSN0938-2259
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Social Sciences - general equilibrium, non-ordered preferences, equilibrium manifold, natural projection, demand functions

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