DECENTRALIZATION IN INFINITE HORIZON ECONOMIES

Decentralization in Infinite Horizon Economies brings together a collection of essays that attempt to explore one of the basic themes in microeconomics — can a decentralized economy attain an efficient or optimal allocation of resources when it is allowed to evolve without a predetermined terminal date? The failure of a price-guided competitive system to ensure efficiency/Pareto optimality with an infinite horizon was exposed by Malinvaud and Samuelson. Subsequent research, reported in this volume, achieved a deeper understanding of the problem, and obtained definitive results that are of interest in a much broader framework.