Externalities and a Measure Space of Consumers

This paper considers an exchange economy with a measure space of agents and consumption externalities, which take into account two possible external effects in consumers’ preferences: the dependence upon prices and other agents’ consumptions, respectively, as in Greenberg et al. [12] and Khan and Vohra [15] (see also Balder [4] for a general discussion). This allows to cover a general model of reference coalitions externalities, in which the agents’ preferences are influenced by the global (or the mean) consumption of the agents in the finitely many reference coalitions. Our paper provides a general existence theorem of equilibria that extends previous results by Schmeidler [21], in the case of fixed reference coalitions and Noguchi [17], for a more particular concept of reference coalitions.