An Extremal Principle for Accounting Balance of a Resource Value-Transfer Economy: Existence, Uniqueness and Computation

Abstract : An extremal principle for accounting balance of a resource value- transfer economy of W. P. Drews is developed. Through it, existence and uniqueness are completely characterized in terms of an associated linear programming problem of pure distribution (transportation) type. An existence theorem of Dantzig's (established by the Brouwer fixed point theorem under economically unrealistic conditions) is an immediate special corollary. The principle is equivalent to unconstrained minimization of a simple strictly convex function and can be computed thereby. Alternately, it is an extended geometric programming problem whose dual is minimization of a strictly convex function subject to the same distribution constraints mentioned above.