Fatou’s Lemma, Galerkin Approximations and the Existence of Walrasian Equilibria in Infinite Dimensions∗ M. Ali Khan† Department of Economics, The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218, United States e-mail:
[email protected] Nobusumi Sagara Department of Economics, Hosei University 4342, Aihara, Machida, Tokyo 194–0298, Japan e-mail:
[email protected] November 11, 2018 arXiv:1610.04776v2 [math.FA] 19 Feb 2017 ∗This essay was written during Sagara’s visit to Johns Hopkins University, August 13– 21, 2016. The authors are grateful to Rich McLean for a passing remark that shaped the introduction to the essay, and to Takashi Suzuki for wide-ranging conversations regarding Walrasian general equilibrium theory. This research is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant No. 26380246 from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Tech- nology, Japan. †Corresponding author. Abstract This essay has three objectives: (i) to report recent generalizations of Fatou’s lemma to multi-functions taking values in a Banach space, and framed in terms of both Bochner and Gelfand integration; (ii) to delineate the importance of Galerkin approximations in Walrasian general equilibrium theory with a continuum of agents and commodi- ties; and thereby (iii) to present two new results on the existence of a Walrasian equilibrium in economies where the continuum of agents is formalized as a saturated measure space. Key Words: Fatou’s lemma, Galerkin approximation, Lyapunov convex- ity theorem, saturated measure space, Bochner integral, Gelfand integral, Walrasian general equilibrium theory, continuum of agents, continuum of commodities. MSC2010: Primary: 28B05, 28B20, 46G10; Secondary: 65N30, 91B50. Contents 1 Introduction 3 2 Background of the Problem 6 2.1 Fatou’s Lemma in Finite Dimensions .