Can Markets Compute Equilibria? /
Recent turmoil in financial and commodities markets has renewed questions regarding how well markets discover equilibrium prices, particularly when those markets are highly complex. A relatively new critique questions whether markets can realistically find equilibrium prices if computers cannot. For...
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| Natura: | Periodico |
| Lingua: | English |
| Pubblicazione: |
Washington, D.C. :
International Monetary Fund,
2009.
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| Serie: | IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ;
No. 2009/024 |
| Soggetti: | |
| Accesso online: | Full text available on IMF |
| Riassunto: | Recent turmoil in financial and commodities markets has renewed questions regarding how well markets discover equilibrium prices, particularly when those markets are highly complex. A relatively new critique questions whether markets can realistically find equilibrium prices if computers cannot. For instance, in a simple exchange economy with Leontief preferences, the time required to compute equilibrium prices using the fastest known techniques is an exponential function of the number of goods. Furthermore, no efficient technique for this problem exists if a famous mathematical conjecture is correct. The conjecture states loosely that there are some problems for which finding an answer (i.e., an equilibrium price vector) is hard even though it is easy to check an answer (i.e., that a given price vector is an equilibrium). This paper provides a brief overview of computational complexity accessible to economists, and points out that the existence of computational problems with no best solution algorithm is relevant to this conjecture. |
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| Descrizione del documento: | <strong>Off-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required <strong>On-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required |
| Descrizione fisica: | 1 online resource (22 pages) |
| Natura: | Mode of access: Internet |
| ISSN: | 1018-5941 |
| Accesso: | Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students |