General equilibrium theory

The first attempt in neoclassical economics to model prices for a whole economy was made by Léon Walras. Walras' Elements of Pure Economics provides a succession of models, each taking into account more aspects of a real economy (two commodities, many commodities, production, growth, money). Some think Walras was unsuccessful and that the later models in this series are inconsistent.[3][4]

In particular, Walras's model was a long-run model in which prices of capital goods are the same whether they appear as inputs or outputs and in which the same rate of profits is earned in all lines of industry. This is inconsistent with the quantities of capital goods being taken as data. But when Walras introduced capital goods in his later models, he took their quantities as given, in arbitrary ratios. (In contrast, Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu continued to take the initial quantities of capital goods as given, but adopted a short run model in which the prices of capital goods vary with time and the own rate of interest varies across capital goods.)

Walras was the first to lay down a research program widely followed by 20th-century economists. In particular, the Walrasian agenda included the investigation of when equilibria are unique and stable— Walras' Lesson 7 shows neither uniqueness, nor stability, nor even existence of an equilibrium is guaranteed. Walras also proposed a dynamic process by which general equilibrium might be reached, that of the tâtonnement or groping process.

The tâtonnement process is a model for investigating stability of equilibria. Prices are announced (perhaps by an "auctioneer"), and agents state how much of each good they would like to offer (supply) or purchase (demand). No transactions and no production take place at disequilibrium prices. Instead, prices are lowered for goods with positive prices and excess supply. Prices are raised for goods with excess demand. The question for the mathematician is under what conditions such a process will terminate in equilibrium where demand equates to supply for goods with positive prices and demand does not exceed supply for goods with a price of zero. Walras was not able to provide a definitive answer to this question (see Unresolved Problems in General Equilibrium below).

In partial equilibrium analysis, the determination of the price of a good is simplified by just looking at the price of one good, and assuming that the prices of all other goods remain constant. The Marshallian theory of supply and demand is an example of partial equilibrium analysis. Partial equilibrium analysis is adequate when the first-order effects of a shift in the demand curve do not shift the supply curve. Anglo-American economists became more interested in general equilibrium in the late 1920s and 1930s after Piero Sraffa's demonstration that Marshallian economists cannot account for the forces thought to account for the upward-slope of the supply curve for a consumer good.

If an industry uses little of a factor of production, a small increase in the output of that industry will not bid the price of that factor up. To a first-order approximation, firms in the industry will experience constant costs, and the industry supply curves will not slope up. If an industry uses an appreciable amount of that factor of production, an increase in the output of that industry will exhibit increasing costs. But such a factor is likely to be used in substitutes for the industry's product, and an increased price of that factor will have effects on the supply of those substitutes. Consequently, Sraffa argued, the first-order effects of a shift in the demand curve of the original industry under these assumptions includes a shift in the supply curve of substitutes for that industry's product, and consequent shifts in the original industry's supply curve. General equilibrium is designed to investigate such interactions between markets.

Continental European economists made important advances in the 1930s. Walras' arguments for the existence of general equilibrium often were based on the counting of equations and variables. Such arguments are inadequate for non-linear systems of equations and do not imply that equilibrium prices and quantities cannot be negative, a meaningless solution for his models. The replacement of certain equations by inequalities and the use of more rigorous mathematics improved general equilibrium modeling.

The First Fundamental Welfare Theorem asserts that market equilibria are Pareto efficient. In other words, the allocation of goods in the equilibria is such that there is no reallocation which would leave a consumer better off without leaving another consumer worse off. In a pure exchange economy, a sufficient condition for the first welfare theorem to hold is that preferences be locally nonsatiated. The first welfare theorem also holds for economies with production regardless of the properties of the production function. Implicitly, the theorem assumes complete markets and perfect information. In an economy with externalities, for example, it is possible for equilibria to arise that are not efficient.

The first welfare theorem is informative in the sense that it points to the sources of inefficiency in markets. Under the assumptions above, any market equilibrium is tautologically efficient. Therefore, when equilibria arise that are not efficient, the market system itself is not to blame, but rather some sort of market failure.

Even if every equilibrium is efficient, it may not be that every efficient allocation of resources can be part of an equilibrium. However, the second theorem states that every Pareto efficient allocation can be supported as an equilibrium by some set of prices. In other words, all that is required to reach a particular Pareto efficient outcome is a redistribution of initial endowments of the agents after which the market can be left alone to do its work. This suggests that the issues of efficiency and equity can be separated and need not involve a trade-off. The conditions for the second theorem are stronger than those for the first, as consumers' preferences and production sets now need to be convex (convexity roughly corresponds to the idea of diminishing marginal rates of substitution i.e. "the average of two equally good bundles is better than either of the two bundles").

Even though every equilibrium is efficient, neither of the above two theorems say anything about the equilibrium existing in the first place. To guarantee that an equilibrium exists, it suffices that consumer preferences be strictly convex. With enough consumers, the convexity assumption can be relaxed both for existence and the second welfare theorem. Similarly, but less plausibly, convex feasible production sets suffice for existence; convexity excludes economies of scale.

Proofs of the existence of equilibrium traditionally rely on fixed-point theorems such as Brouwer fixed-point theorem for functions (or, more generally, the Kakutani fixed-point theorem for set-valued functions). See Competitive equilibrium#Existence of a competitive equilibrium. The proof was first due to Lionel McKenzie,[8] and Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu.[9] In fact, the converse also holds, according to Uzawa's derivation of Brouwer's fixed point theorem from Walras's law.[10] Following Uzawa's theorem, many mathematical economists consider proving existence a deeper result than proving the two Fundamental Theorems.

Another method of proof of existence, global analysis, uses Sard's lemma and the Baire category theorem; this method was pioneered by Gérard Debreu and Stephen Smale.

Starr (1969) applied the Shapley–Folkman–Starr theorem to prove that even without convex preferences there exists an approximate equilibrium. The Shapley–Folkman–Starr results bound the distance from an "approximate" economic equilibrium to an equilibrium of a "convexified" economy, when the number of agents exceeds the dimension of the goods.[11] Following Starr's paper, the Shapley–Folkman–Starr results were "much exploited in the theoretical literature", according to Guesnerie,[12]^: 112 who wrote the following:

some key results obtained under the convexity assumption remain (approximately) relevant in circumstances where convexity fails. For example, in economies with a large consumption side, nonconvexities in preferences do not destroy the standard results of, say Debreu's theory of value. In the same way, if indivisibilities in the production sector are small with respect to the size of the economy, [ . . . ] then standard results are affected in only a minor way.[12]^: 99

To this text, Guesnerie appended the following footnote:

The derivation of these results in general form has been one of the major achievements of postwar economic theory.[12]^: 138

In particular, the Shapley-Folkman-Starr results were incorporated in the theory of general economic equilibria[13][14][15] and in the theory of market failures[16] and of public economics.[17]

Although generally (assuming convexity) an equilibrium will exist and will be efficient, the conditions under which it will be unique are much stronger. The Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem, proven in the 1970s, states that the aggregate excess demand function inherits only certain properties of individual's demand functions, and that these (continuity, homogeneity of degree zero, Walras' law and boundary behavior when prices are near zero) are the only real restriction one can expect from an aggregate excess demand function. Any such function can represent the excess demand of an economy populated with rational utility-maximizing individuals.

There has been much research on conditions when the equilibrium will be unique, or which at least will limit the number of equilibria. One result states that under mild assumptions the number of equilibria will be finite (see regular economy) and odd (see index theorem). Furthermore, if an economy as a whole, as characterized by an aggregate excess demand function, has the revealed preference property (which is a much stronger condition than revealed preferences for a single individual) or the gross substitute property then likewise the equilibrium will be unique. All methods of establishing uniqueness can be thought of as establishing that each equilibrium has the same positive local index, in which case by the index theorem there can be but one such equilibrium.

Given that equilibria may not be unique, it is of some interest to ask whether any particular equilibrium is at least locally unique. If so, then comparative statics can be applied as long as the shocks to the system are not too large. As stated above, in a regular economy equilibria will be finite, hence locally unique. One reassuring result, due to Debreu, is that "most" economies are regular.

Work by Michael Mandler (1999) has challenged this claim.[18] The Arrow–Debreu–McKenzie model is neutral between models of production functions as continuously differentiable and as formed from (linear combinations of) fixed coefficient processes. Mandler accepts that, under either model of production, the initial endowments will not be consistent with a continuum of equilibria, except for a set of Lebesgue measure zero. However, endowments change with time in the model and this evolution of endowments is determined by the decisions of agents (e.g., firms) in the model. Agents in the model have an interest in equilibria being indeterminate:

Indeterminacy, moreover, is not just a technical nuisance; it undermines the price-taking assumption of competitive models. Since arbitrary small manipulations of factor supplies can dramatically increase a factor's price, factor owners will not take prices to be parametric.[18]^: 17

When technology is modeled by (linear combinations) of fixed coefficient processes, optimizing agents will drive endowments to be such that a continuum of equilibria exist:

The endowments where indeterminacy occurs systematically arise through time and therefore cannot be dismissed; the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie model is thus fully subject to the dilemmas of factor price theory.[18]^: 19

Some have questioned the practical applicability of the general equilibrium approach based on the possibility of non-uniqueness of equilibria.

In a typical general equilibrium model the prices that prevail "when the dust settles" are simply those that coordinate the demands of various consumers for various goods. But this raises the question of how these prices and allocations have been arrived at, and whether any (temporary) shock to the economy will cause it to converge back to the same outcome that prevailed before the shock. This is the question of stability of the equilibrium, and it can be readily seen that it is related to the question of uniqueness. If there are multiple equilibria, then some of them will be unstable. Then, if an equilibrium is unstable and there is a shock, the economy will wind up at a different set of allocations and prices once the convergence process terminates. However, stability depends not only on the number of equilibria but also on the type of the process that guides price changes (for a specific type of price adjustment process see Walrasian auction). Consequently, some researchers have focused on plausible adjustment processes that guarantee system stability, i.e., that guarantee convergence of prices and allocations to some equilibrium. When more than one stable equilibrium exists, where one ends up will depend on where one begins. The theorems that have been mostly conclusive when related to the stability of a typical general equilibrium model are closed related to that of the most local stability.

Keynesian and Post-Keynesian economists, and their underconsumptionist predecessors criticize general equilibrium theory specifically, and as part of criticisms of neoclassical economics generally. Specifically, they argue that general equilibrium theory is neither accurate nor useful, that economies are not in equilibrium, that equilibrium may be slow and painful to achieve, and that modeling by equilibrium is "misleading", and that the resulting theory is not a useful guide, particularly for understanding of economic crises.[25][26]

Let us beware of this dangerous theory of equilibrium which is supposed to be automatically established. A certain kind of equilibrium, it is true, is reestablished in the long run, but it is after a frightful amount of suffering.

— Simonde de Sismondi, New Principles of Political Economy, vol. 1, 1819, pp. 20-21.

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.

— John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1923, ch. 3

It is as absurd to assume that, for any long period of time, the variables in the economic organization, or any part of them, will "stay put," in perfect equilibrium, as to assume that the Atlantic Ocean can ever be without a wave.

— Irving Fisher, The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions, 1933, p. 339

Robert Clower and others have argued for a reformulation of theory toward disequilibrium analysis to incorporate how monetary exchange fundamentally alters the representation of an economy as though a barter system.[27]

While general equilibrium theory and neoclassical economics generally were originally microeconomic theories, new classical macroeconomics builds a macroeconomic theory on these bases. In new classical models, the macroeconomy is assumed to be at its unique equilibrium, with full employment and potential output, and that this equilibrium is assumed to always have been achieved via price and wage adjustment (market clearing). The best-known such model is real business-cycle theory, in which business cycles are considered to be largely due to changes in the real economy, unemployment is not due to the failure of the market to achieve potential output, but due to equilibrium potential output having fallen and equilibrium unemployment having risen.

Within socialist economics, a sustained critique of general equilibrium theory (and neoclassical economics generally) is given in Anti-Equilibrium,[28] based on the experiences of János Kornai with the failures of Communist central planning, although Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel later based their Parecon model on the same theory.[29]