Brownian equilibria under Knightian uncertainty

Abstract

This paper establishes, in the setting of Brownian information, a general equilibrium existence result in a heterogeneous agent economy. The existence is generic among income distributions. Agents differ moreover in their stochastic differential formulation of intertemporal recursive utility. The present class of utility functionals is generated by a recursive integral equation and incorporates preference for the local risk of the stochastic utility process. The setting contains models in which Knightian uncertainty is represented in terms of maxmin preferences of Chen and Epstein (2002). Alternatively, Knightian decision making in terms of an inertia formulation from Bewley (2002) can be modeled as well.