A general and practical competitive market model for trading indivisible goods is introduced. There are a group of buyers and a group of sellers, and several indivisible goods. Each buyer is initially endowed with a sufficient amount of money and each seller is endowed with several units of each...

Abstract: Disequilibrium trade can occur in a market lacking both recontracting options and a computational system that maps utilities into prices. This paper studies disequilibrium trade in a large market for an indivisible good. We focus on two issues: the speed of adjustment when arbitrage...

We employ laboratory methods to study stability of competitive equilibrium in Scarf's economy (International Economic Review, 1960). Tatonnement theory predicts that prices are globally unstable for this economy, i.e. unless prices start at the competitive equilibrium they oscillate without...

Although historians of economic thought emphasize J.-B. Say's contributions to utility theory, the structure of the subject matter of economics, entrepreneur theory and the construction of the "law of markets," they rarely appreciate what Say accomplished in the first edition of the Traité...

The paper considers price adjustment on the plane and derives global stability conditions for such dynamics. First, we examine the well-known Scarf Example, to obtain and analyze a global stability condition for this case. Next, for a general class of excess demand functions, a set of conditions...

The paper considers price adjustment on the plane and derives global stability conditions for such dynamics. First, we examine the well-known Scarf Example, to obtain and analyze a global stability condition for this case. Next, for a general class of excess demand functions, a set of conditions...

For perfectly competitive economies under uncertainty, there is a well-known equivalence between a formulation with contingent goods and one with state-specific securities followed by spot markets for goods. In this paper, I examine whether this equivalence carries over to a particular form of...

Rubinstein and Wolinsky (1990b) consider a simple decentralized market in which agents either meet randomly or choose their partners volunatarily and bargain over the terms on which they are willing to trade. Intuition suggests that if there are no transaction costs, the outcome of this matching...

The paper considers price adjustment on the plane and derives global stability conditions for such dynamics. First, we examine the well-known Scarf Example, to obtain and analyze a global stability condition for this case. Next, for a general class of excess demand functions, a set of conditions...

In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic...