Knowledge that Transforms

THE THEORY of the general competitive equilibrium, as developed by Leon Walras [64], has recently been reformulated in terms of fairly advanced mathematical methods. The first problem studied extensively was concerned with the conditions under which a competitive equilibrium exists for a model of general equilibrium. Among contributions to the existence problem, Wald [63], Arrow and Debreu [5], McKenzie [35], Nikaido [48], Gale [18], and Negishi [44] may be cited. The optimality problem of a competitive equilibrium was also investigated by, e.g., Arrow [2], Debreu [15, 16], and, in