ON THE UNIQUENESS OF COMPETITIVE-EQUILIBRIUM

The paper is concerned with the following question: in addition to loc al uniqueness, what other conditions must be imposed to ensure global uniqueness of competitive equilibrium? The answer is provided within a standard framework involving excess demand functions. Conditions are identified which have the nice property that they are true close to a regular equilibrium. Uniqueness is established by considering an adjus tment process and showing that under the mentioned conditions, every e quilibrium is locally asymptotically stable and moreover the process i tself is globally stable; uniqueness follows from an Arrow and Hahn (1 971) result. Alternatively, the paper may be seen as identifying condi tions under which there is a vectorfield satisfying the requirements o f an uniqueness result due to Dierker (1974).