Perturbed Utility and General Equilibrium Analysis

Wei Ma
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Wei Ma: International Business School Suzhou, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China and Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, South Africa.

No 201701, Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study general equilibrium theory of complete markets in an otherwise standard economy with each household having an additive perturbed utility function. Since this function represents a type of stochastic choice theory, the equilibrium of the corresponding economy is defined to be a price vector that makes its mean expected demand equal its mean endowment. We begin with a study of the economic meaning of this notion, by showing that at any given price vector, there always exists an economy with deterministic utilities whose mean demand is just the mean expected demand of our economy with additive perturbed utilities. We then show the existence of equilibrium, its Pareto inefficiency, and the upper hemi-continuity of the equilibrium set correspondence. Specializing to the case of regular economies, we finally demonstrate that almost every economy is regular and the equilibrium set correspondence in this regular case is continuous and locally constant.

Keywords: General equilibrium; Stochastic choice; Regular economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-mic and nep-upt
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pre:wpaper:201701

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