تعادل عمومی در اقتصاد های بزرگ با ساختار درونی تقسیم کار

We study a general equilibrium model with specialization and division of labor. The market coordinates all individuals’ decisions in choosing their patterns of specialization in order to utilize positive network effects of division of labor net of transaction costs. We establish the equilibrium existence theorem, the first and second welfare theorems, and the core equivalence for a family of general equilibrium models with both possible increasing returns and transaction costs. Using an analytical framework with consumer–producers, economies of specialization, and transaction costs, we resurrect the spirit of the classical economics of the division of labor in a modern body of mathematical formalism.

In this paper, we study a general equilibrium model that allows for increasing returns to labor specialization. Adam Smith (1776) made a forceful point in the Wealth of Nations that an individual's productivity increases if the individual specializes in a particular productive activity. As a result, the overall efficiency of an economy increases as all individuals specialize in production of different goods and trade with others for what they do not produce themselves. However, this classical idea of Smith's had received so little formal treatment in the modern general equilibrium theory that Stigler (1976, pp. 1209–1210) made the following comment on the 200th anniversary of publication of the Wealth of Nations: “The last of Smith's regrettable failures is one for which he is overwhelmingly famous — the division of labor. … (A)lmost no one used or now uses the theory of division of labor, for the excellent reason that there is scarcely such a theory. … (T)here is no standard, operable theory to describe what Smith argued to be the mainspring of economic progress. Smith gave the division of labor an immensely convincing presentation — it seems to me as persuasive a case for the power of specialization today as it appeared to Smith. Yet there is no evidence, so far as I know, of any serious advance in the theory of the subject since his time, and specialization is not an integral part of the modern theory of production, which may well be an explanation for the fact that the modern theory of economies of scale is little more than a set of alternative possibilities.”