On the uniqueness of competitive equilibrium

Summary. The paper is concerned with the following question: in addition to local uniqueness, what other conditions must be imposed to ensure global uniqueness of competitive equilibrium? The answer is provided within a standard framework involving excess demand functions. Conditions are identified which have the nice property that they are true close to a regular equilibrium. Uniqueness is established by considering an adjustment process and showing that under the mentioned conditions, every equilibrium is locally asymptotically stable and moreover the process itself is globally stable; uniqueness follows from an Arrow and Hahn (1971) result. Alternatively, the paper may be seen as identifying conditions under which there is a vectorfield satisfying the requirements of an uniqueness result due to Dierker (1974).