Journal Information  ·  Mission  ·  Editorial Board  ·  Directory of Economists Submissions  ·  New Submission  ·  Submit a Revision Table of Contents  ·  Refereed Content            Notes            Comments            Preliminary Results  ·  Research       Announcements  ·  Letters to the Editor  ·  Conference       Announcements  ·  Search Email Notification Service and Directory of Research Economists  ·  Add me to Directory  ·  Modify my Profile General  ·  Submission Guidelines  ·  PDF Conversion  ·  Copyright  ·  Electronic Publishing  ·  Archiving  ·  Sponsors and       Endorsements  ·  Economic Links     Ennio Bilancini and Fabio Petri "A Comment On Gintis's "The Dynamics of General Equilibrium"" (2008, Vol. 2, No. 3.)     Gintis (2007, 'The Dynamics of General Equilibrium', Economic Journal 117 (523) , 1280–1309) provides an agent-based model of a Walrasian economy where the tâtonnement is replaced by imitation. His simulations show that the economy converges to the Walrasian equilibrium. Gintis concludes that 1) his stability results provide some justification for the importance placed upon the Walrasian model, and 2) models allowing agents to imitate successful others lead to an economy with a reasonable level of stability and efficiency. Since these conclusions appear to be intended as general, we caution that Gintis's findings can only be accepted for Walrasian models without capital goods; in models with capital goods imitation-based adjustments alter the equilibrium's data (which makes the demonstration of stability impossible) and raise other important problems (absent from Gintis's simulations) still awaiting exploration.     Keywords :   Walrasian equilibrium, imitation, stability, agent-based simulations, capital goods     Manuscript Received : 8/26/2008   Manuscript Accepted : 12/22/2008   This abstract has been downloaded 782 times.