Equilibrium Data Sets and Compatible Utility Rankings

Abstract

Sets consisting of finite collections of prices and endowments such that total resources are constant, or collinear, or approximately collinear, can always be viewed as subsets of some equilibrium manifold. The additional requirement that such collections of price-endowment data are compatible with some individual preference rankings is reduced to the existence of solutions to some set of linear inequalities and equalities. This characterization enables us to give simple proofs of the contractibility of the set whose elements are finite equilibrium data collections compatible with given individual preference rankings and the path-connectedness of the set made of finite equilibrium data set.