Abstract

We consider Leontief exchange economies, i.e., economies where the consumers desire goods in fixed proportions. Unlike bimatrix games, such economies are not guaranteed to have equilibria in general. On the other hand, they include suitable restricted versions which always have equilibria. We give a reduction from two-player games to a special family of Leontief exchange economies, which are guaranteed to have equilibria, with the property that the Nash equilibria of any game are in one-to-one correspondence with the equilibria of the corresponding economy. Our reduction exposes a potential hurdle inherent in solving certain families of market equilibrium problems: finding an equilibrium for Leontief economies (where an equilibrium is guaranteed to exist) is at least as hard as finding a Nash equilibrium for two-player nonzero sum

Citations