Saverio Maria Fratini

The Gravitation of Market Prices as A Stochastic Process

The theory of value has been based ever since Adam Smith on the idea that the market prices of commodities, those at which actual trade takes place, gravitate around a central position known as natural prices. This paper seeks to develop a statistical idea of the process in question and suggests in particular that market prices can be said to gravitate around natural prices if the probability of their means being very close to natural prices after t observations tends to 1 as t tends to infinity. A set of possible conditions leading to that result is also presented.

Reswitching and decreasing demand for capital

We consider a Wicksellian or Neo-Austrian model of production with a continuum of techniques. For this model we provide an example in which a monotonically decreasing demand for capital schedule is combined with reswitching and a net product per worker that increases (over a certain interval) as the interest rate increases.

Real Wicksell Effect, Demand for Capital and Stability

The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between reverse capital deepening and instability of the equilibrium between investments and savings. It is shown for a model with n commodities, infinitely many linear technique of production, and overlapping generations that a badly behaved real Wicksell effect, as in the case of a ‘reswitching of techniques’, can involve instability.

ECONOMIC GENERALITY VERSUS MATHEMATICAL GENERICITY: ACTIVITY-LEVEL INDETERMINACY AND THE INDEX THEOREM IN CONSTANT RETURNS PRODUCTION ECONOMIES

When the mathematical concept of genericity was arrived at in economics, it was meant more or less as a synonym for generality. Referring to constant return production economies, we will argue that this is not always the case. In particular, the representation of technology that is mathematically generic is not at all general for economists. We will see that in cases that are economically general, but not mathematically generic, activity-level indeterminacy may occur. In these cases, Kehoes index theorem, a well-known result of the application of the differentiable approach to production economies, becomes unusable.

Symposium on Arrigo Opocher and Ian Steedman (

After an editorial that motivates the symposium on the book by Arrigo Opocher and Ian Steedman, there are comments by five scholars (in alphabetical order). These deal with capital theoretic issues (Bellino), the labour demand curve (Bidard), the zero‐excess‐profit position in alternative theories of value (Fratini), the role of intermediate as opposed to final products in the setting of prices (Harcourt) and the role of time in the analysis (Yoshihara). Then follows a response by Opocher and Steedman.