Note that the particular form of “nonexistence of a representative agent” John mentions is an original result that’s not too difficult to show informally, but hasn’t really been written down formally either here or in the economics literature.
Ryan Kidd and I did an economics literature review a few weeks ago for representative agent stuff, and couldn’t find any results general enough to be meaningful. We did find one paper that proved a market’s utility function couldn’t be of a certain restricted form, but nothing about proving the lack of a coherent utility function in general. A bounty also hasn’t found any such papers.
Note that the particular form of “nonexistence of a representative agent” John mentions is an original result that’s not too difficult to show informally, but hasn’t really been written down formally either here or in the economics literature.
Ryan Kidd and I did an economics literature review a few weeks ago for representative agent stuff, and couldn’t find any results general enough to be meaningful. We did find one paper that proved a market’s utility function couldn’t be of a certain restricted form, but nothing about proving the lack of a coherent utility function in general. A bounty also hasn’t found any such papers.