Elena del Mercato

PSE Professor

CV IN FRENCH CV IN ENGLISH
Website RePEc page
  • Associate Professor
  • Associate Professor
  • Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
  • CSEF
Research groups
Research themes
  • Game Theory
  • General Equilibrium
  • Mathematical Economics
Contact

Address :Maison des Sciences Economiques,
75647 Paris Cedex 13, France

Address :106-112 Boulevard de l’Hôpital

Campus: CES-Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne
Floor: 5
Office: 518
Declaration of interest
See the declaration of interest

Tabs

Elena del Mercato is Maître de Conférences hors classe at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Associate Researcher at Paris School of Economics (PSE), Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne (CES).

She holds a Doctorate in “Mathematics for Economic Decisions” from the University of Pisa (Italy). She has been Assistant Professor at University of Salerno (Italy) and Associate Researcher at the Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF) – Bocconi University, University of Naples “Federico II” and University of Salerno (Italy).

Elena del Mercato is Deputy Coordinator and Director of Studies of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree “QEM – Models and Methods of Quantitative Economics”, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (coordinating institution – France), UCLouvain (Belgium), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), Università Ca’ Foscari of Venice (Italy), and Warsaw School of Economics (Poland).

Her research focuses on market failures in microeconomic theory, such as externalities and public goods.

 

Elena del Mercato est Maître de Conférences hors classe à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne et chercheur associé à l’Ecole d’Economie de Paris (PSE), Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne (CES).

Elle a obtenu un Doctorat en “Mathématiques pour les décisions économiques” à l’Université de Pise (Italie). Elle a été Ricercatore (Assistant Professor) à l’Université de Salerne (Italie) et chercheur associé au Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF) – Bocconi University, Université de Naples “Federico II” et Université de Salerno (Italie).

Elena del Mercato est Coordinatrice adjointe et Directrice des études du Master EMJMQ “QEM – Models and Methods of Quantitative Economics”, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (coordination – France), UCLouvain (Belgique), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Espagne), Università Ca’ Foscari of Venice (Italie), and Warsaw School of Economics (Pologne).

Ses recherches portent sur les défaillances du marché dans la théorie microéconomique, principalement les externalités et les biens publics.

  • “Markets, Equilibrium and Optimum”, Licence L3 MIASHS – in French
    This course is based on the classic paradigm of general equilibrium models, the concepts of competitive equilibrium and social welfare associated with these models. It is well known that the existence of competitive equilibria and the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics are based on highly restrictive assumptions of full transaction, complete information, absence of money, absence of public goods, and absence of interactions among agents. For that reason, the classical model has been modified considering these different kinds of “imperfections”. One of the topics of this course concerns externalities, that is situations where agents’ decisions affect the choices of the others. In the context of general equilibrium models, the natural adaptation of the concept of competitive equilibrium leads to a concept of equilibrium à la Nash. As in the classical case, equilibrium prices reflect the individual marginal effects. But, welfare conditions à la Pareto reflect the social marginal effects. So, in general, the presence of externalities leads to sub-optimal equilibrium allocations. Several possibilities are open to recover the Pareto optimality of equilibrium allocations.
  • “Microeconomics 1”, Masters M1 IMMAEF and MAEF – in English
    The first part of the course deals with individual decision making by consumers and producers. The second part of the course is devoted to production economies.
  • “Optimization A: Optimization in Euclidean Spaces”, Master QEM1 and DU MMEF – in English
  • “General Equilibrium Theory” (with P. Gourdel), Masters M2 MMMEF and APE – in English
    The general equilibrium theory studies the interactions among heterogeneous agents on commodity and financial markets. The course begins with an outline of the main properties of a competitive equilibrium in the classical Arrow-Debreu model (existence, efficiency, local uniqueness). The course then focuses on advanced questions arising from market imperfections and it consists of two parts:

    1. “General equilibrium and Externalities (E. del Mercato)”,

     2. “General equilibrium and Financial Markets (P. Gourdel)”.

 

Articles dans revues à comité de lecture / Articles in refereed journals

 

 

Education
  • Master of Sciences (Laurea) in Mathematics, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy, 1999.
  • Doctorate in Mathematics for Economic Decisions, University of Pisa, Italy, 2000-2004.
  • Visiting Scholar, Ph.D. in Economics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, 2000 (September-December).
Past Positions
  • Research Fellow in General Equilibrium and Game Theory, University of Florence, Italy, 2003.
  • Assistant Professor (Ricercatore), University of Salerno, Italy, 2004-2008.
  • Associate Researcher, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF) – Bocconi University, University of Naples “Federico II” and University of Salerno, Italy, 2006-2014.
Visiting Positions
  • Visiting Researcher, Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy, March 2018 (two weeks), February 2019 (two weeks), February/March 2022 (one week), February 2023 (one week), October 2024 (one week).
  • Visiting Researcher, Columbia Business School, New York, USA, April 2017 (one week).
  • Visiting Assistant Professor and Oswald Fellow, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA, 2007 (October-December).
  • Visiting Researcher, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, 2007 (February-July).
  • Visiting Researcher, University Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, 2003 (September-December) and 2005-2006 (February-June).

 

 

Publications HAL

  • Existence of an equilibrium in arrowian markets for consumption externalities Journal article

    We study the existence of quasi-equilibria and equilibria for pure exchange economies with consumption externalities and Arrowian markets with personalized Lindahl prices. We provide examples showing first that quasi-equilibria and equilibria of the externality economy fail to exist under assumptions guaranteeing existence for economies without externalities. We show that the externality economy has identical equilibrium allocations of an appropriately defined constant returns to scale production economy without externalities. We exploit this equivalence to map sufficient conditions for the existence of quasi-equilibria and equilibria of the production economy into sufficient conditions of the pure exchange economy with externalities, thereby unveiling suitable irreducibility conditions and survival conditions.
    Journal: Journal of Economic Theory

    Published in

  • Sufficient conditions for a “simple” decentralization with consumption externalities Journal article

    We consider a pure exchange economy with consumption externalities in preferences. We use the notion of competitive equilibrium à la Nash. We provide the Social Redistribution assumption to restore the Second Welfare Theorem. We then introduce the differentiable characterizations of Social and Strong Redistribution. We show that all these conditions are weaker than other relevant assumptions studied in the literature. Our conditions entail interesting results on the decentralized implementation of Pareto optima, that link together the competitive supporting price and the shadow price of the utilitarian social planner. Finally, we provide a specific condition for Bergson-Samuelson utility functions, which has a nice interpretation in terms of positive or negative externalities.
    Journal: Journal of Economic Theory

    Published in

  • Private ownership economies with externalities and existence of competitive equilibria: A differentiable approach Journal article

    We consider a general equilibrium model of a private ownership economy with consumption and production externalities. Utility functions and production technologies may be affected by the consumption and production activities of all other agents in the economy. We use homotopy techniques to show that the set of competitive equilibria is non-empty and compact. Fixing the externalities, the assumptions on utility functions and production technologies are standard in a differentiable framework. Competitive equilibria are written in terms of first order conditions associated with agents’ behavior and market clearing conditions, following the seminal paper of Smale (J Math Econ 1:1–14, 1974). The work of adapting the homotopy approach to economies with externalities on the production side is non-trivial and it requires some ingenious adjustments, because the production technologies are not required to be convex with respect to the consumption and production activities of all agents.
    Journal: Journal of Economics

    Published in

  • On the regularity of smooth production economies with externalities: Competitive equilibrium à la Nash Journal article

    We consider a general equilibrium model of a private ownership economy with consumption and production externalities. The choices of all agents (households and firms) may affect utility functions and production technologies. The allocation of a competitive equilibrium is a Nash equilibrium. We provide an example showing that, under standard assumptions, competitive equilibria are indeterminate in an open set of the household’s endowments. Next, we consider a new version of this model, with firms’ endowments in the spirit of Geanakoplos et al. (J Math Econ 19:113–151, 1990). In our model, firms’ endowments impact the technologies of the other firms. We then prove that, generically in the space of endowments of households and firms, each economy has a finite number of competitive equilibria and each competitive equilibrium is locally a differentiable map of the fundamental parameters.
    Journal: Economic Theory

    Published in

  • Externalities, consumption constraints and regular economies Journal article

    We consider a general model of pure exchange economies with consumption externalities. Households may have different consumption sets and each consumption set is described by a function called the possibility function. Utility and possibility functions depend on the consumptions of all households. Showing by means of an example that basic assumptions are not enough to guarantee generic regularity, we provide sufficient conditions for generic regularity in the space of endowments and possibility functions.
    Journal: Economic Theory

    Published in

  • General consumption constraints and regular economies Journal article

    In the spirit of Smale’s work, we consider pure exchange economies with general consumption sets. In this paper, the consumption set of each household is described in terms of a function called possibility function. The main innovation comes from the dependency of each possibility function with respect to the individual endowments. We prove that, generically in the space of endowments and possibility functions, economies are regular. A regular economy has a finite number of equilibria, which locally depend on endowments and possibility functions in a continuous manner.
    Journal: Journal of Mathematical Economics

    Published in

All publications