Francis Ysidro Edgeworth developed much of the graphical analysis of consumer demand theory that is used to this day in microeconomics. From his work, economists developed the "Edgeworth Box", which describes all the feasible ways to allocate two goods between two consumers, given the total amounts available.
Edgeworth developed a theory of the "core" of a voluntary exchange economy, which, according to Blaug, "dealt with the case of a set of agents with certain initial holdings of commodities in the absence of anything like a price system; these agents are fr ee to form any blocks and coalitions for the purpose of improving their situation by trade and no redistribution of commodities via trade is allowed unless each and every agent agrees voluntarily to the final outcome. As the number of agents increases, i t can be shown,...that 1) the "core" containing all agents that agree to the final distribution of commodities contains the equilibrium allocations of commodities that would result from a price system under perfect competition, and 2) in the limit, the s et of competitive equilibria allocations are the only outcomes which satisfy the stability requirements of the "core"."
Works by Francis Ysidro Edgeworth:
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