born Dec. 16, 1834, Évreux, France
died Jan. 5, 1910, Clarens, near Montreux, Switz.
French-Swiss economist.
An advocate of cooperative s as an alternative to revolution, he ran a bank for producers' cooperatives with Léon Say (grandson of Vilfredo Pareto ) as the Lausanne school. Walras's Elements of Pure Economics (1874–77) was one of the first comprehensive mathematical analyses of general economic equilibrium. Assuming an environment of free competition, he constructed a mathematical model in which productive factors, products, and {{link=price">price s automatically adjust in equilibrium. He thus tied together the theories of production, exchange, money , and capital.