Lionel W. McKenzie and the Proof of the Existence of a Competitive Equilibrium

摘要

The theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy, which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist, is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth-century economics. The discovery is commonly attributed to the paper by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu, "Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy," which was published in the July 1954 issue of Econometrica. The citations for the Nobel Prizes conferred on Arrow in 1972 and on Debreu in 1983 each refer to their work on general equilibrium theory.