This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Conventional wisdom tells us that with no market failure and local non-satiation of preferences, the core is at least as large as the collection of competitive equilibrium allocations.We con.rm this for a standard model featuring land. Next we consider the public land ownership version of the...

The aim of this paper is to develop some measure-theoretic methods for the study of large economic systems with individual-specific randomness and multiple optimal actions. In particular, for a suitably formulated continuum of correspondences, an exact version of the law of large numbers in...

Focusing on the testable implications on the equilibrium manifold, we show that the rationalizability problem is NP-complete. Subsequently, we present an integer programming (IP) approach to characterizing general equilibrium models. This approach avoids the use of the Tarski-Seidenberg...

Collective consumption decisions taken by the members of a household may prove inefficient. The impact of such inefficient household decisions on market performance is investigated. At one extreme, market efficiency can occur even when household decisions are inefficient, namely when household...

Collective consumption decisions taken by the members of a household may prove inefficient. The impact of such inefficient household decisions on market performance is investigated. At one extreme, market efficiency can occur even when household decisions are inefficient, namely when household...

The work of Friedrich Von Hayek contains several testable predictions about the nature of market processes. Vernon Smith termed the most important one the 'Hayek Hypothesis': equilibrium prices and the gains from trade can be achieved in the presence of diffuse, decentralized information, and in...

We discover that letting agents pairwise sequentially exchange at "wrong" prices has a robust effect on prices at convergence. If the initial relative price for a good is cheaper than the equilibrium walrasian price due to initial endowments, the initial excess demand effect pushes resource...

We include initial holdings in the jungle economy of Piccione and Rubinstein (Economic Journal, 2007) and relax the assumptions on consumption sets and preferences. We show that initial holdings are irrelevant for lexicographic welfare maximization. Equilibria other than such maximizers can be...

The introduction and widespread use of credit cards increases trading efficiency but, by also increasing the velocity of money, it causes inflation, in the absence of monetary intervention. If the monetary authority attempts to restore pre-credit card price levels by reducing the money supply,...