Information dissemination and aggregation are key economic functions of financial markets. How intelligent do traders have to be for the complex task of aggregating diverse information (i.e., approximate the predictions of the rational expectations equilibrium) in a competitive double auction...

We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that causes prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. This constrained suboptimality of...

We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that cause prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. The argument can be extended to...

Attainment of rational expectations equilibria in asset markets calls for the price system to disseminate agents' private information to others. Markets populated by human agents are known to be capable of converging to rational expectations equilibria. This paper reports comparable market...

Humans cooperate a great deal in economic activity, but our two major models of equilibrium – Walrasian competitive in markets and Nash in games – portray us as only non-cooperative. In earlier work, I have proposed a model of cooperative decision making (Kantian optimization); here, I embed...

An adequate description of economic dynamics requires the introduction of a monetary system including default penalties and expectations in a society whose economy utilizes money and credit. This essay notes and discusses several of the factors involved in the use of money and credit in a...

Socialism is conceptualized as a society in which individuals cooperate, distinguished from capitalism, characterized as involving ubiquitous economic competition. Here, I embed a formal model of cooperation in an Arrow-Debreu model, using the Kantian optimization protocol, and define a...

This essay is the second of three. The first is nontechnical and in part autobiographical describing the evolution of my approach to developing a micro economic theory of money and financial institutions. This essay is devoted to a mathematical sketch of a closed economic exchange system with...

We prove the existence of monetary equilibrium in a finite horizon economy with production. We also show that if agents expect the monetary authority to significantly decrease the supply of bank money available for short term loans in the future, then the economy will fall into a liquidity trap...

Recently Cherchye et al. (2011) reformulated the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities, introduced by Brown and Matzkin (1996), as an integer programming problem and proved that solving the Walrasian equilibrium inequalities is NP-hard. Brown and Shannon (2002) derived an equivalent system of...