Following Mittermaier's search for "the hand behind the invisible hand" and using some results of my research on the so-called Lausanne school, this article attempts to discuss the two very different invisible hands behind Walras' and Pareto's respective version of general equilibrium. Unlike...

The notion of solution plays a crucial role in the conceptual system of Léon Walras, the founder of General Equilibrium Theory (GET). In this paper, after introducing the two solution concepts employed by Walras in the development of his version of GET, respectively called the "theoretical" and...

In general screening problems, implementable allocation rules correspond exactly to Walrasian equilibria of an economy in which types are consumers with quasilinear utility and unit demand. Due to the welfare theorems, an allocation rule is implementable if and only if it induces an efficient...

I demonstrate a straightforward but apparently widely unrecognized implication of the standard requirements for perfect competition: an economy in which consumers can choose to learn is generally not perfectly competitive. In particular, if endogenous welfare relevant learning is feasible, the...

This paper extends the dynamic Mirrlees model to general equilibrium and derives the optimal social insurance policies against persistent idiosyncratic risk over the life cycle. Agents are heterogeneous in their work ability, which is private information and evolves stochastically over time, and...

The article is concerned with understanding the impact of social preferences and wealth inequality on aggregate economic outcomes. We investigate how different manifestations of other-regarding preferences affect incentive contracts at the microeconomic level and how these in turn translate into...

In a fundamental contribution, Prescott and Townsend (1984) [PT] have shown that the existence and efficiency properties of Walrasian equilibria extend to economies with moral hazard, when agents' trades are observable (exclusive contracts can be implemented). More recently, Bennardo and...

A competitive market mechanism is a prominent example of a nonbinary social choice rule, typically defined for a special class of economic environments in which each social state is an economic allocation of private goods, and individuals’ preferences concern only their own personal...

We consider optional TOU (time-of-use) pricing for residential consumers as an alternative to a single TOU or flat rate structure offered by a publicly regulated electricity supplier. A general equilibrium model is developed and used to explore and quantify the effects of optional pricing on...

A system of thought allowed for the free market price of land to cyclically go down to zero. This is the economics of Moses. The economics of Jesus is a restatement of the economics of Moses. The first was applied during Biblical times and the latter, united with Aristotle’s thought and...