This book is the outgrowth of a course on general equilibrium theory I have taught to second year graduate students for the past dozen years or so. A few intend mathematical economics as their primary specialty, but most do not. This book is designed to meet the needs of both types of student. In my experience, it has been quite effective.

What specialist and nonspecialist alike need from a book like this is motivation: Where are we heading and why? The first three chapters provide that motivation, building the case that general equilibrium theory is indeed worth learning. What makes the approach work is a reliance on examples rather than theorems and proofs. Examples provide an excellent, and rather painless, opportunity to acquire facility with the abstract notation and concepts of general equilibrium theory. Applications are nontrivial and often unusual: overlapping generations, contingent commodities, indivisibility, local public goods, and hedonic theory. Exercises provide the opportunity to test and strengthen competence.

Although motivation is paramount, these first three chapters accomplish more than that. The reader finishing this introductory material is familiar with important facts about vector spaces and their duals, and sensitive to their geometry. She has learned how to translate the central concepts of general equilibrium theory into the formal language of mathematics, and the formality seems less abstract. And she has a stockpile of examples to draw upon to illustrate the theory building which follows.

The remaining five chapters build upon this foundation, making the transition from examples to rigorous theory.