Can Markets Compute Equilibria?

22 Pages Posted: 11 Mar 2009

See all articles by Hunter Monroe

Hunter Monroe

International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Date Written: February 2009

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Capital markets, Commodity markets, Prices, Economic models

Suggested Citation

Monroe, Hunter, Can Markets Compute Equilibria? (February 2009). IMF Working Paper No. 09/24, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1356452

Hunter Monroe (Contact Author)

International Monetary Fund (IMF) ( email )

700 19th Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20431
United States

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