ABSTRACT
Statistical equilibrium is a short-run, temporary equilibrium model of market exchange which replaces the Walrasian picture of the market in equilibrium as a budget hyperplane defined by equilibrium relative prices with a scalar field of transaction probabilities. The theory of statistical equilibrium proposes to replace the representation of the market as a single system of relative prices at which agents believe they can make any transactions with a representation of the market as a scalar probability field over possible transactions. The computation of statistical equilibrium is straightforward given the partition functions that define the market. The statistical equilibrium entropy prices define a scalar field of probabilities over the commodity space. The existence of prices at which bundles of disparate commodities can be valued underlies the suspicion of a discoverable quantitative orderliness to economic interactions on which economic theory and measurement rest.
