Recontracting and competition
We characterize the set of Walrasian allocations of an economy as the set of allocations which can be supported by abstract equilibria that satisfy a recontracting condition which reflects the idea that agents can freely trade with each other. An alternative (and weaker) recontracting condition characterizes the core. The results are extended to production economies by extending the definition of the recontracting condition to include the possibility of agents to recontract with firms. However, no optimization requirement is imposed on firms. In pure exchange economies, an abstract equilibrium is a feasible allocation and a list of choice sets, one for each agent, that satisfy the following conditions: an agent's choice set is a subset of the commodity space that includes his endowment; and each agent's equilibrium bundle is a maximal element in his choice set, with respect to his preferences. The recontracting condition requires that any agent can buy bundles from any other agent's choice set by offering the other agent a bundle he prefers to his equilibrium bundle.
Walrasian Allocations without Price-Taking Behavior
Consider an exchange economy where agents are arbitragers, in that they try to upset allocations imagining plausible beneficial trades. With an introspective algorithm, each agent constructs an interactive choice set (ICS), i.e., a set of bundles that he considers achievable through a sequence of plausible trades with other agents. We show that Walrasian allocations can be characterized as those where each agent chooses optimally from his ICS, which is always contained in a budget set (with differentiability, both sets coincide). Our analysis provides a different behavioral assumption underlying Walrasian allocations, offers an explanation for the source of competitive prices, and connects with the core convergence theorem.
Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948
The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African-American activism against racial segregation and discrimination, especially as they were practised by the federal government itself. In this study, the author links these cultural and political forces by showing how African-American activists, public officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to influence a national debate about racial inequality. Drawing on a body of national public affairs programming about African-Americans and race relations, the author uses these radio shows to demonstrate the emergence of a new national discourse about race and ethnicity, racial hatred and injustice, and the contribution of racial and immigrant populations to the development of the United States. These programmes, Savage contends, challenged the nation to reconcile its professed egalitarian ideals with its unjust treatment of black Americans and other minorities. This examination of radio's treatment of race as a national political issue also provides important evidence that the campaigns for racial justice in the 1940s served as an essential, and still overlooked, precursor to the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Savage argues. The next battleground would be in the South, and on television.