Walras introduced a theoretical model of the auction sequence. It can be assumed that after the first round of auctions, the estimated prices will approach the equilibrium somewhat. This should be followed by a second iteration — a new round of auctions, etc. French economist M. Allais was the first to show that the assumption of the gross substitutability of goods included in the product survey ensures the convergence of the "groping" processes.
The algorithm proposed by Walras is still actively used in the theory of general equilibrium. It is easy to see, however, that such procedures were speculative from the very beginning and were proposed only as a tool for some kind of "mental experimentation." A long chain of auctions, during which participants can bring estimated prices for their goods (services) closer to equilibrium values, can hardly give an idea of the real mechanisms of competitive pricing. Instead of a huge number of interactions at the atomic level, a purely centralized procedure is proposed, in which a real exchange takes place for the first time when the iterative process has essentially already been completed. Moreover, it is unclear under what conditions it can be assumed that the described tatonnement procedure provides a sufficiently fast convergence of the process.
As studies of this process using game models show, in certain situations, participants become interested in intentionally distorting business information, coordinating their operations with the actions of other sellers (or buyers), etc.
Thus, Walras's general equilibrium schemes (to an even greater extent, this applies to his followers) actually lack a description of the market mechanism itself for the formation of equilibrium prices. At best, they can only reflect the final results of a more or less prolonged "groping" process embodied in equilibrium prices.
Price changes remain the main means of helping to achieve market equilibrium in the models under consideration. Since prices are assumed to be extremely flexible, the obstacles to a general equilibrium can only be of a "technical" nature (for example, a large number of iterations assumed by the groping procedure). Nonequilibrium processes, which play such an important role in everyday economic practice, did not attract much attention from Walras; they were even less often mentioned by his followers, who, as a rule, based on the postulates of neoclassical analysis. It is only in recent decades that there have been some changes in this area — a special class of nonequilibrium models has appeared within the framework of general equilibrium theory. Découvrez
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