How Agents Learn and Economies Evolve

case, the "selling" price would need to Cover the price of the pipe. 10. In 1972, Hugo Sonnenschein surprised many mathematical economists by showing that the rule of price adjustment arising from a given set of agent preferences and endowments can literally be any rule you like. More importantly, it need not be the kind of rule that leads to one of Adam Smith's invisible-hand equilibria. In view of this result, a static equilibrium becomes a very unlikely state of economic affairs. For a discussion of Sonnenschein's result, as well as some other paradoxical aspects of economic processes, see Saari (1995). 11. For the technically-minded, a jxrd-poitzt attractor contains only one state; a prriodic attractor Set is a sequence of states periodically occupied by the system at each iteration; a chaotic attractor doesn't show any simple geometrical structure, but is often fractal, and is such that the sequence of states depends sensitively on