Abstract

Bruno de Finetti's main writings on economic equilibrium date back to the Thirties. Taking Pareto's works as main reference, de Finetti developes a critique of competitive equilibrium from a methodological-ethical point of view. He follows Pareto and Barone's approach in separating the optimality of equilibrium from the competitive mechanism. From the mathematical point of view, his contributions are very remarkable. In 1937, he gives to the concept of Pareto optimum a formal treatment, anticipating necessary conditions which were given only after the war by Kuhn and Tucker in the context of non linear programming. He also introduces (in 1949) the concept of quasi concave function.