Formulating an objective for an economy

Our presentation concerns efforts to properly formulate a model. Our model is an economic model used for technology assessment. In order for it to be useful, it is important that the dual variables represent as realistically as possible real world prices. This required us to formulate the model as a time-staged economic equilibrium model. Our main result is a proof that an equilibrium formulation using expected aggregate demand can under certain conditions be replaced by one in which the economy is driven by an aggregate utility or objective function, one that promotes economic growth subject to physical flow constraints. We show that such an objective function always exists except for populations consisting of significantly large classes of people whose consumption patterns differ radically one from another.