The objective of a firm is not well-defined if firms have market power. We present an example of Cournot-Walras competition in order to shed light on this problem and to motivate the concept of real wealth maximization that B. Grodal and E. Dierker have proposed asthe firm's objective. (JEL:...

In the quasilinear case, surplus maximization leads to constrained efficient Drèze equilibria. We investigate the question of whether surplus maximization can be useful beyond the quasilinear case. We use two different surplus concepts, the equivalent and the compensating surplus. The first one...