The unifying formalism of domination: Value,price, distribution and growth in joint production

Conclusion A broad range of economic questions, from the existence of a system of prices to the existence of balanced growth paths can be tackled with the same basic concept of domination which has been proposed. This theoretical tool was introduced as an algebraic device to account, within a unified framework, for a numbers of properties of a productive system. In fact, the case of the existence of a price system as related to the question of the choice of technology reveals the fundamental economic significance of the concept. From various points of view, a set of production processes can have a kind of internal inconsistency, which makes it incapable of functioning as an economic system. The domination relation which refers to the domination of one set of processes by another set provides a theoretical account of these inconsistencies in various situations and from various points of view. It thus points to economically significant hierarchic relations, such as the existence of prices of production or of balanced growth paths.This paper has been translated into English by Serge A. S. Demyanenko with the assistance of D. Foley. It is an extended version of a paper presented at the conference Production jointe et capital fixe (Nanterre, 1982).