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Tags: economy
Categories: Economics & Finance
In welfare economics, the theory of the second best concerns what happens when one or more optimality conditions cannot be satisfied. Canadian economist Richard Lipsey and Australian economist Kelvin Lancaster showed in a 1956 paper that if one optimality condition in an economic model cannot be satisfied, it is possible that the next-best solution involves changing other variables away from the ones that are usually assumed to be optimal.
(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_second_best)
