亚当·斯密的价值理论：他的市场价格发现过程的数学表述

Adam Smith's Theory of Value: A Mathematical Statement of his Market Price Discovery Process

作者：

Sabiou M. Inoua

弗农·史密斯（Vernon L. Smith）

The relevance of Adam Smith for understanding human morality and sociality is generally accepted; witness the growing interest that his work is stimulating among scholars of various academic backgrounds (philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, economists). But, paradoxically, Adam Smith’s theory of economic value enjoys a less prominent stature to day among economists, who, while they view him as the ‘father of modern economics’, considered him more as having had the right intuitions about a market economy than as having developed the right concepts and the technical tools for studying it. Yet the neoclassical tradition failed to provide a satisfactory theory of price formation owing to the dominant axiom of price taking behavior; for if everyone takes prices as given, how do these prices emerge in the first place? Who is giving the prices? One early escape from this crucial price-discovery problem consisted of assuming that all traders should have complete information of supply and demand and the consequent equilibrium prices (Jevons, [1871] 1888) ; the other, that formed the basis of general equilibrium theory, imagines a fictional auctioneer who finds the equilibrium prices by trial-and-error adjustments or tatonnement (Walras, [1874] 1954). Adam Smith’s theory of the market mechanism (Ch. 7, Book 1, Wealth of Nations, 1776), as we shall argue in this paper, offers the right conceptual framework for understanding competitive price discovery, for which we offer a mathematical formulation. Mathematically, the driving force behind competitive price dynamics is not excess demand per se, but its integral; we make this concept, explored at the beginning in experimental economics (Smith, 1962), part of our formalization of classical competitive price dynamics. Finally, we explain key propositions of Smith’s theory of value in the light of this mathematical formulation.
人们普遍接受亚当·斯密（Adam Smith）与理解人类道德和社会性的相关性。见证了他的工作引起了不同学术背景的学者（哲学家，政治理论家，社会学家，经济学家）日益增长的兴趣。但是，自相矛盾的是，亚当·斯密的经济价值理论在经济学家中没有那么突出的地位，他们虽然认为亚当·史密斯是“现代经济学之父”，但更认为他对市场经济具有正确的直觉而不是已经开发出正确的概念和研究它的技术工具。然而，由于占主导地位的价格接受行为公理，新古典主义传统未能提供令人满意的价格形成理论。因为如果每个人都按照给定的价格 这些价格如何首先出现？谁在给价格？摆脱这一至关重要的价格发现问题的一个早期逃脱在于，假设所有交易者都应具有完整的供求信息以及由此产生的均衡价格（Jevons，[1871] 1888）；另一种则构成了一般均衡理论的基础，他是一个虚构的拍卖师，他通过反复试验或重整法找到平衡价格（Walras，[1874] 1954）。正如我们将在本文中争论的那样，亚当·斯密的市场机制理论（第7章，《世界财富》第1卷，1776年）为理解竞争性价格发现提供了正确的概念框架，为此我们提供了数学公式。从数学上讲，具有竞争力的价格动态背后的驱动力本身并不是多余的需求，而是不可或缺的。我们提出了这个概念，这是在实验经济学的开始（史密斯，1962年）中探讨的，这是我们经典竞争价格动力学形式化的一部分。最后，根据这一数学公式，我们解释了史密斯价值理论的关键命题。