Edgeworth equilibria, fuzzy core, and equilibria of a production economy without ordered preferences (Q753619)

This paper unifies various past approaches to the existence of a quasi- equilibrium of an economy with finitely many economic agents and infinitely many commodities \({\mathcal E}\). It also strengthens the past results by dropping the completeness and transitivity assumptions on preference relations. The first ingredient is the author's own work on the nonemptiness of the core of a coalition production economy without ordered preferences under the balancedness assumption on the technology. The second ingredient is the work of \textit{C. D. Aliprantis, D. J. Brown} and \textit{O. Burkinshaw} [J. Econ. Theory 43, 252-291 (1987; Zbl 0637.90017)] which proposes the Edgeworth equilibrium concept as the intersection \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E})\) of the core of the replica economies and shows the equivalence of \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E})\) and the quasi-equilibria allocations of \({\mathcal E}\) under the ``properness'' assumption. The nonemptiness of the core of the replicated private-ownership economies is proved by observing that the technology of each replica economy is balanced. The nonemptiness of \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E})\) follows by a simple compactness argument. Then the author defines an auxiliary economy \({\mathcal E}_ z\) and shows that if \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E}_ z)\) is nonempty then there exists a member of \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E}_ z)\) which is a quasi-equilibrium allocation of \({\mathcal E}\). Under an ``interiority'' assumption as under the ``properness'' assumption, \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E}_ z)\) coincides with \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E})\) and the existence of quasi-equilibria follows from the nonemptiness of \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E})\). The paper also establishes several conditions for the nonemptiness of \({\mathcal C}^ e({\mathcal E}_ z)\), hence for the existence of a quasi-equilibrium of \({\mathcal E}\).