Bartering integer commodities with exogenous prices

Abstract

The analysis of markets with indivisible goods and xed exogenous prices has played an important role in economic models, especially in relation to wage rigidity and unemployment. This paper provides a novel mathematical programming based approach to study pure exchange economies where discrete amounts of commodities are exchanged at xed prices. Barter processes, consisting in sequences of elementary reallocations of couple of commodities among couples of agents, are formalized as local searches converging to equilibrium allocations. A direct application of the analyzed processes in the context of computational economics is provided, along with a Java implementation of the approaches described in this paper: http://www-eio.upc.edu/~nasini/SER/launch.html