Competitive Equilibrium and Societal Welfare 1. General Competitive Equilibrium

1. GENERAL COMPETITIVE EQUILIBRIUM 1.1. Economic system. An economic system is a collection of consumers, firms, and products and the environment in which they make decisions. We summarize this information as follows. 1.1.1. The economic environment. The actions taken by any agent depend on the opportunities presented to that agent. These opportunities depend on the economic environment of the agent. This environment is determined (constrained) by: 1: basic physical and biological properties of the world in which the agent lives, 2: the man-made technologies available and in use, 3: the actions of other agents, 4: the institutional framework of the economic system, and 5: other legal, social or moral limits on choice, 6: uncertain or stochastic factors that influence other parts of the environment. 1.1.2. Goods. There are L goods in the economy numbered l = 1, 2, . . . , L. We characterize these goods in three different ways. a: The goods as objects of choice by consumers. A product vector is a list of the amounts of the various products: x = 