APPROACHES TO ECONOMIC EQUILIBRIUM

We study mechanisms that help to explain why and how equilibrium may e ventually be attained in many economic settings. Examples include comp etitive markets and many noncooperative games. The main object is an a daptive process, reflecting repeated adjustment of individual strategi es, which under monotonicity conditions leads to equilibrium. Environm ental uncertainty is accommodated, but agents need neither know the pr obability law, nor invoke any statistical learning theory, nor compute mean values. In fact, everyone can act - perhaps without precedent, m aybe among strangers - within unidentified frames. Nonetheless, we sho w, under reasonable conditions, that individual optimality and system equilibrium obtains in the long run.