Tag Archives: Kenneth Arrow

On VoxEU, Steven Durlauf offers an excellent overview over Kenneth Arrow’s work. Durlauf emphasizes five areas of research: The impossibility theorem, in the tradition of Condorcet. General equilibrium theory and the welfare theorems, in the tradition of Walras. Decision-making under uncertainty, the Arrow-Pratt measures of risk aversion and contingent commodities. Imperfect information, in the context of medical care and as a source of statistical discrimination. Economics of knowledge,...

In his blog A Fine Theorem, Kevin Bryan discusses the history of economic thought leading from the classical economists and Walras to Arrow and Debreu. My read of the literature on GE following Arrow is as follows. First, the theory of general equilibrium is an incredible proof that markets can, in theory and in certain cases, work as efficiently as an all-powerful planner. That said, the three other hopes of general equilibrium theory since the days of Walras are, in fact, disproven by...

In the FT, Tim Harford (here) and Martin Sandbu (here) review Kenneth Arrow’s monumental contributions to economics.

In the New York Times, Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen explain Condorcet’s system for electing candidates who truly command majority support. In this system, a voter has the opportunity to rank candidates. Maskin and Sen’s fictitious example of the American primaries illustrates the difference between a plurality system (as used in the primaries) and a majority system a la Condorcet (where the winner is the one who defeats any other candidate in pairwise comparison). They also point out that...