Closing the invisible hand: a rehabilitation of tâtonnement dynamics

Arguments are made that, for a typical economy, with many goods and consumers, classical tâtonnement dynamics results in a unique, globally stable equilibrium. Since global stability implies uniqueness of equilibrium, these kinds of results complete the positive general equilibrium program classically put forward in favor of the invisible hand. Such stability is demonstrated for economies with consumers having preferences drawn from the CES family, and similar results are reported when the preferences are chosen, instead, to be of the indirect addilog form.