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...

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...

The objective of this note is to analyze some implications of the model of commodity money described in Banerjee and Maskin (1996) which may seem paradoxical. In order to do this, we incorporate a general production cost structure into the model. We focus on two different results. First, the...

For his proof of the existence of a general competitive equilibrium Abraham Wald assumed a strictly pseudomonotone inverse market demand function or, equivalently, that market demand satisfies the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference. It is well known that more recent existence theorems do not need...

Abstract: This paper supports the literature which argues that derivational robustness can have epistemic import in abstract economic models. The defense is based on a particular example from mathematical economic theory, the dynamic Walrasian general equilibrium model. It is argued that...

After the existence of general equilibrium was proved in the early 1950s, the next decade brought applications of general-equilibrium theory to policy issues such as the welfare effects of tariffs and the incidence of the corporate income tax. By the 1970s, general-equilibrium theory was being...

This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two firms could be stuck in a “bad” equilibrium in the absence of a coordinated action to...