ON NO-ENVY AND FAIR ALLOCATIONS IN GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM THEORY

This essay revisits and attempts a synthetic consolidation of a subject that was peripheral to general competitive analysis as initially developed by Wald and Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie, but central to social choice theory as developed by Arrow-Harsanyi-Sen and their followers. We provide a retrospective reading that connects to Foley, and even earlier to Steinhaus and Dubins-Spanier and a prospective one that takes as its point of departure the recent work of Echenique, Fleurbaey, Moulin, Thompson, and others that is more oriented to welfare economics, on the one hand, and to matching and network theory on the other. The principal motivation of the work reported here is bring together communities in an exploratory framing that can become the basis for future work of the authors, if not of that of others.