Stone Age Equilibrium

Harold Houba and Hans-Peter Weikard

No 09-092/1, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: We introduce the notion of a stone age equilibrium to study societies in which property rights are absent, bilateral exchange is either coercive or voluntary, and relative strength governs power relations in coercive exchange. We stress the importance of free disposal of goods which allows for excess holdings larger than consumption, thereby modelling the power to withhold goods from others. Under complete, transitive, continuous and strictly-convex preferences, stone age equilibria exist. The maximum of the lexicographic welfare function in which agents are ranked by descending strength always corresponds to a stone age equilibrium. Every stone age equilibrium is weakly Pareto efficient.

Keywords: Power; Exchange Economy; Coercive Trade; Voluntary Trade; Power to Take (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D0 D7 P0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-11-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/09092.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:tin:wpaper:20090092

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().