Decentralization in infinite horizon economies / [edited by] Mukul Majumdar.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Decentralization in Infinite Horizon Economies: An Introduction (Mukul Majumdar);
2. Optimal Intertemporal Allocation Mechanisms and Decentralization of Decisions (Leonid Hurwicz and Mukul Majumdar);
3. On Characterizing Optimal Competitive Programs in Terms of Decentralizable Conditions (Wiliam A Brock and Mukul Majumdar);
4. Characterization of Intertemporal Optimality in Terms of Decentralizable Conditions: The Discounted Case (Swapan Dasgupta and Tapan Mitra);
5. Intertemporal Optimality in a Closed Linear Model of Production, Swapan Dasgupta and Tapan Mitra;
6. On Characterizing Optimality of Stochastic Competitive Processes (Yaw Nyarko);
7. A Characterization of Infinite Horizon Optimality in Terms of Finite Horizon Optimality and a Critical Stock Condition (Tapan Mitra and Debraj Eay);
8. A Necessary Condition for Decentralization and an Application to Intertemporal Allocation (Leonid Hurwicz and Hans F Weinberger);
9. Decentralized Evolutionary Mechanisms for Intertemporal Economies: A Possibility Result (Venkatesh Bala, Mukul Majumdar and Tapan Mitra);
10. Complements and Details (Mukul Majumdar).

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.