Contributions to the modeling of markets

When Walras began his investigations in 1868, economics in Europe was hardly a scientific pursuit but rather a mixture of normative prescriptions, classical theories expressed alongside protectionist doctrines, and commercial law. In England, it was in the state exemplified by the work of John Stuart Mill – with much that could be used as a basis for future investigations, but also without a clear view of the relationships of distribution and production, limited by a cost of production theory of value, without consumer demand functions derived from preference functions, and lacking a theory of supply and demand in markets that are related to other markets. The attitude of most of Walras's contemporaries was that since economic behavior involves preferences and the human will, it cannot be modeled, and certainly not described by equations, which were regarded as rigid and deterministic. Walras changed all that, transforming the way that economics was studied on the Continent.