Groups and Markets: General Equilibrium with Multi-member Households - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hans Gersbach holds the Chair of Macroeconomics: Innovation and Policy at ETH Zurich. He is also a member of CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research at ETH Zurich and a CEPR Research Fellow in Public Policy and Industrial Organization. He is Chairman of the Academic Advisory Council at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in Germany and a member of the Steering Committee of the Swiss Institute for Business Cycle Research (KOF) at ETH Zurich. He is an IZA and a CESifo Research Fellow. Hans Gersbach's current research focuses on the design of new economic and politicialpolitical institutions for the well-being of society. It also includes macroeconomic policy design, innovation and growth, epidemic diseases and financial stability. He has published extensively in all of these fields.

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This monograph studies multi-member households or, more generally, socio-economic groups from a purely theoretical perspective and within a general equilibrium framework, in contrast to a sizeable empirical literature. The approach is based on the belief that households, their composition, decisions and behavior within a competitive market economy deserve thorough examination. The authors set out to link the formation, composition, decision-making, and stability of households. They develop general equilibrium models of pure exchange economies in which households can have several, typically heterogeneous members and act as collective decision-making units on the one hand and as competitive market participants on the other hand. Moreover, the more advanced models combine traditional exchange (markets for commodities) and matching (markets for people or partners) and develop implications for welfare, social structures, and economic policy.

In the field of family economics, Hans Haller and Hans Gersbach have pioneered a ‘market’ approach that applies the tools of general equilibrium theory to the analysis of household behavior. This very interesting book presents an overview of their methods and results. This is an inspiring work.

Pierre-André Chiappori

The sophisticated, insightful and challenging analysis presented in this book extends the theory of the multi-person household along an important but relatively neglected dimension, that of general equilibrium theory. It also challenges GE theorists themselves to follow Paul Samuelson in taking seriously the real attributes of that fundamental building block, the household, as a social group whose decisions may not satisfy the standard axioms of individual choice. This synthesis and extension of their earlier work by Gersbach and H

Ray Rees, LMU Munich, Germany