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Experimental results on market behavior establish a lower stability and efficiency of markets for durable re-tradable assets compared to markets for non-durable, or perishable, goods. In this chapter, we revisit this known but underappreciated dichotomy of goods in the light of our theory of competitive market price formation, and we emphasize the fundamental nature of the concept of asset re-tradability in neoclassical finance through a simple reformulation of the famous no-trade and no-arbitrage theorems.

"Economists miss the boat when they act as if Arrow and Debreu's general equilibrium model accurately describes markets in the real world of constant change. In contrast, the classical view on the market mechanism offers a helpful foundation on which to add modern insights about how markets create and coordinate information."

This paper introduces and formalizes the classical view on supply and demand, which, we argue, has an integrity independent and distinct from the neoclassical theory. Demand and supply, before the marginal revolution, are defined not by an unobservable criterion such as a utility function, but by an observable monetary variable, the reservation price: the buyer's (maximum) willingness to pay (WTP) value (a potential price) and the seller's (minimum) willingness to accept (WTA) value (a potential price) at the marketplace. Market demand and supply are the cumulative distribution of the buyers' and sellers' reservation prices, respectively. This WTP-WTA classical view of supply and demand formed the means whereby market participants were motivated in experimental economics although experimentalists (trained in neoclassical economics) were not cognizant of their link to the past. On this foundation was erected a vast literature on the rules of trading for a host of institutions, modern and ancient. This paper documents textually this reappraisal of classical economics and then formalizes it mathematically. A follow-up paper will articulate a theory of market price formation rooted in this classical view on supply and demand and in experimental findings on market behavior.

In retrospect, the experimental findings on competitive market behavior called for a revival of the old, classical, view of competition as a collective higgling and bargaining process (as opposed to price-taking behaviors) founded on reservation prices (in place of the utility function). In this paper, we specialize the classical methodology to deal with speculation, an important impediment to price stability. The model involves typical features of a field or lab asset market setup and lends itself to an experimental test of its specific predictions; here we use the model to explain three general stylized facts, well established both empirically and experimentally: the excess, fat-tailed, and clustered volatility of speculative asset prices. The fat tails emerge in the model from the amplifying nature of speculation, leading to a random-coefficient autoregressive return process (and power-law tails); the volatility clustering is due to the traders' long memory of news; bubbles are a persistent phenomenon in the model, and, assuming the standard lab present value pattern, the bubble size increases with the proportion of speculators and decreases with the trading horizon.

The relevance of Adam Smith for understanding human morality and sociality is recognized in the growing interest in his work on moral sentiments among scholars of various academic backgrounds. But, paradoxically, Adam Smith's theory of economic value enjoys a less prominent stature today among economists, who, while they view him as the 'father of modern economics', considered him more as having had the right intuitions about a market economy than as having developed the right concepts and the technical tools for studying it. Yet the neoclassical tradition, which replaced the classical school around 1870, failed to provide a satisfactory theory of market price formation. Adam Smith's sketch of market price formation (Ch. VII, Book I, Wealth of Nations), and more generally the classical view of competition as a collective higgling and bargaining process, as this paper argues, offers a helpful foundation on which to build a modern theory of market price formation, despite any shortcomings of the original classical formulation (notably its insistence on long-run, natural value). Also, with hindsight, the experimental market findings established the remarkable stability, efficiency, and robustness of the old view of competition, suggesting a rehabilitation of classical price discovery. This paper reappraises classical price theory as Adam Smith articulated it; we explicate key propositions from his price theory and derive them from a simple model, which is an elementary sketch of the authors' more general theory of competitive market price formation.