On the study of the economic equilibrium problem through preference relations.

In this paper we consider a competitive economic equilibrium problem where preferences of consumers are expressed by means of a binary relation. The aim is to find a suitable quasi-variational inequality which characterizes the equilibria and, by using tools of variational theory, to study such equilibria. The novelty of this paper consists in the study of an economic equilibrium problem by a variational approach without the need of representing the consumer's preferences by a utility function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]