COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN
ECONOMICS Box 208281
COWLES FOUNDATION DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 1261 Information and the Existence of Stationary Markovian Equilibrium Ioannis Karatzas, Martin Shubik, William D. Sudderth June 2000 We describe conditions for the existence of a stationary Markovian equilibrium when total production or total endowment is a random variable. Apart from regularity assumptions, there are two crucial conditions: (i) low information -- agents are ignorant of both total endowment and their own endowments when they make decisions in a given period, and (ii) proportional endowments -- the endowment of each agent is in proportion, possibly a random proportion, to the total endowment. When these conditions hold, there is a stationary equilibrium. When they do not hold, such equilibrium need not exist. Keywords: Information, stochastic process, money, and disequilibrium JEL Classification: C72, C73, D80 |