English

Information equilibrium as an economic principle

Economics 2015-10-09 v1

Abstract

A general information equilibrium model in the case of ideal information transfer is defined and then used to derive the relationship between supply (information destination) and demand (information source) with the price as the detector of information exchange between demand and supply. We recover the properties of the traditional economic supply-demand diagram. Information equilibrium is then applied to macroeconomic problems, recovering some common macroeconomic models in particular limits like the AD-AS model, IS-LM model (in a low inflation limit), the quantity theory of money (in a high inflation limit) and the Solow-Swan growth model. Information equilibrium results in empirically accurate models of inflation and interest rates, and can be used to motivate a 'statistical economics', analogous to statistical mechanics for thermodynamics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.02435,
  title  = {Information equilibrium as an economic principle},
  author = {Jason Smith},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.02435},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

44 pages, 26 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:16:00.571Z