This paper examines the comparative statics of Walrasian economies with excess demand functions which obey the weak axiom. We show that in these economies there is a precise sense in which goods that are in excess supply (demand) after some perturbation will experience a fall (rise) in its price. We apply this to an exchange economy with additive utility functions, which can be interpreted as a financial economy with von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. We show that when the subjective probabilities which agents attribute to a particular state falls, so will the price of consumption in that state. Another interesting issue is the impact of changes to the endowment on the equilibrium price. We develop conditions under which, for an exchange economy, this equilibrium map - from endowment to equilibrium price - will obey the weak axiom and another stronger, monotonicity property.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford in its series Economics Papers with number
2001-W3.