No other phrase has been as widely and as controversially used in the discussion of capitalism and markets as the ‘invisible hand', a metaphor that Adam Smith used just once in each of his major works. There has been a debate as to whether Smith himself attached any importance to this...

The main contribution of this paper is to place smooth infinite economies in the setting of the equilibrium manifold and the natural projection map à la Balasko. We show that smooth infinite economies have an equilibrium set that has the structure of a Banach manifold and that the natural...

We study global properties of the equilibrium set of economies with a continuous consumption space. This framework is important in intertemporal allocation problems (continuous or infinite time), financial markets with uncertainty (continuous states of nature) and commodity differentiation. We...

We provide an axiomatic framework for exchange markets with a willingness-to-pay/willingness-to-accept discrepancy. First, we obtain a two parameter family of market invariants under price-scaling representing the excess demand. One of the parameters can be identified as endowment. The other is...

We construct an index theorem for smooth infinite economies that shows that generically the number of equilibria is odd. As a corollary, this gives a new proof of existence and gives conditions that guarantee global uniqueness of equilibria. -- Uniqueness ; determinacy ; equilibria ; infinite...

In the paper, the concept of Walrasian sequential equilibrium is developed to formalize the notions of fundamental social and endogenous uncertainties and entrepreneurial discovery. It predicts that social sequential experiments with efficient as well as inefficient network patterns of division...

A general and practical competitive market model for trading indivisible goods is introduced. There are a group of buyers and a group of sellers, and several indivisible goods. Each buyer is initially endowed with a sufficient amount of money and each seller is endowed with several units of each...

The majority of results in the literature on general equilibrium are not for an economy (i.e. given an endowment and preferences), but rather, for a set of economies (i.e. a set of endowments given preferences). Therefore, we argue that the most appropriate robustness result requires perturbing...