A local independence condition for characterization of Walrasian allocations rule (Q1178815)

For an Arrow-Debreu pure exchange economy with a finite set of consumers and a finite set of private goods, a social choice rule associates subsets of feasible allocations with utility profiles that describe consumer preferences. This paper characterizes Walrasian resource allocations in terms of social choice axioms. A strong assumption is made on the set of utility profiles: this set is ``rich'' and for every non-trivial profile, besides some usual continuity, differentiability, concavity and strict monotonicity assumptions, the individual preferences are such that every consumption bundle, at least as good for a consumer as its initial endowment, belongs to the interior of the positive orthant of the commodity space. In the first part of the paper, it is proved that the Walrasian rule is the only social choice rule satisfying individual rationality, Pareto principle, non-discrimination and a last condition, called ``local independence'', closely related to Arrow's independence condition of irrelevant alternatives. The last part of the paper relates the local independence condition with Nash implementability with strong star shapedness around Nash equilibria. The results are much indebted to special assumptions and make the author's axiomatization difficult to compare with anterior Hurwicz results.