The Dynamics of General Equilibrium: A Comment on Professor Gintis

Ennio Bilancini and Fabio Petri ()

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: This is a comment on Gintis (2007, 'The Dynamics of General Equilibrium', Economic Journal 117 (523) , 1280–1309), who provides an agent-based model of a Walrasian economy where the tâtonnement is replaced by imitation. His simulations show that the economy converges to the Walrasian equilibrium. Gintis concludes that 1) his stability results provide some justification for the importance placed upon the Walrasian model, and 2) models allowing agents to imitate successful others lead to an economy with a reasonable level of stability and efficiency. Since these conclusions appear to be intended as general, we caution that Gintis's findings can only be accepted for Walrasian models without capital goods; in models with capital goods imitation-based adjustments alter the equilibrium's data (which makes the demonstration of stability impossible) and raise other important problems (absent from Gintis's simulations) still awaiting exploration.

Keywords: Walrasian equilibrium; imitation; stability; agent-based simulations; capital goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B12 B13 D51 D58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp, nep-dge and nep-evo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.deps.unisi.it/quaderni/538.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usi:wpaper:538

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Fabrizio Becatti ().