Publications by PSE researchers

We consider a pure exchange economy with consumption externalities in preferences. We use the notion of competitive equilibrium à la Nash. We provide the Social Redistribution assumption to restore the Second Welfare Theorem. We then introduce the differentiable characterizations of Social and Strong Redistribution. We show that all these conditions are weaker than other relevant assumptions studied in the literature. Our conditions entail interesting results on the decentralized implementation of Pareto optima, that link together the competitive supporting price and the shadow price of the utilitarian social planner. Finally, we provide a specific condition for Bergson-Samuelson utility functions, which has a nice interpretation in terms of positive or negative externalities.

We study the existence of quasi-equilibria and equilibria for pure exchange economies with consumption externalities and Arrowian markets with personalized Lindahl prices. We provide examples showing first that quasi-equilibria and equilibria of the externality economy fail to exist under assumptions guaranteeing existence for economies without externalities. We show that the externality economy has identical equilibrium allocations of an appropriately defined constant returns to scale production economy without externalities. We exploit this equivalence to map sufficient conditions for the existence of quasi-equilibria and equilibria of the production economy into sufficient conditions of the pure exchange economy with externalities, thereby unveiling suitable irreducibility conditions and survival conditions.

We consider a general equilibrium model of a private ownership economy with consumption and production externalities. The choices of all agents (households and firms) may affect utility functions and production technologies. The allocation of a competitive equilibrium is a Nash equilibrium. We provide an example showing that, under standard assumptions, competitive equilibria are indeterminate in an open set of the household’s endowments. Next, we consider a new version of this model, with firms’ endowments in the spirit of Geanakoplos et al. (J Math Econ 19:113–151, 1990). In our model, firms’ endowments impact the technologies of the other firms. We then prove that, generically in the space of endowments of households and firms, each economy has a finite number of competitive equilibria and each competitive equilibrium is locally a differentiable map of the fundamental parameters.

We consider a general equilibrium model of a private ownership economy with consumption and production externalities. Utility functions and production technologies may be affected by the consumption and production activities of all other agents in the economy. We use homotopy techniques to show that the set of competitive equilibria is non-empty and compact. Fixing the externalities, the assumptions on utility functions and production technologies are standard in a differentiable framework. Competitive equilibria are written in terms of first order conditions associated with agents’ behavior and market clearing conditions, following the seminal paper of Smale (J Math Econ 1:1–14, 1974). The work of adapting the homotopy approach to economies with externalities on the production side is non-trivial and it requires some ingenious adjustments, because the production technologies are not required to be convex with respect to the consumption and production activities of all agents.

We consider a general model of pure exchange economies with consumption externalities. Households may have different consumption sets and each consumption set is described by a function called the possibility function. Utility and possibility functions depend on the consumptions of all households. Showing by means of an example that basic assumptions are not enough to guarantee generic regularity, we provide sufficient conditions for generic regularity in the space of endowments and possibility functions.

In the spirit of Smale's work, we consider pure exchange economies with general consumption sets. In this paper, the consumption set of each household is described in terms of a function called possibility function. The main innovation comes from the dependency of each possibility function with respect to the individual endowments. We prove that, generically in the space of endowments and possibility functions, economies are regular. A regular economy has a finite number of equilibria, which locally depend on endowments and possibility functions in a continuous manner.