COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS
AT YALE UNIVERSITY

Box 208281
New Haven, CT 06520-8281

Lux et veritas

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