Strictly speaking, decision theory really is concerned only with the fourth part of the division given above, that is, the determination of the compu… - Kenneth Arrow

Finding out the prices of a large range of commodities is itself a costly enterprise, and knowledge of this fact by price setters is itself enough to create incentives for inefficient market behavior. If one individual has more information about the quality of a good than the second, the first may exploit the situation, and the second, distrusting him, may not take advantage of what is in fact a desirable trade.

My own interest first centered on the relations between Pareto efficiency and competitive equilibrium. In particular, there was considerable discussion among economists in the late 1940’s about the inefficiencies resulting from rent control and different proposals for arriving at the efficiency benefits of a free market by one or another transition route. Part of the informal efficiency arguments hinged on the idea that under rent control people were buying the wrong kind of housing, say, excessively large apartments. It struck me that an individual bought only one kind of housing, not several. The individual optima were at corners, and therefore one could not equate marginal rates of substitution by going over to a free market. Yet diagrammatic analysis of simple cases suggested to me that the traditional identification of competitive equilibrium and Pareto efficiency was correct but could not be proved by the local techniques of the differential calculus.

From a theoretical viewpoint, one might say that the market is in a strange sort of equilibrium; there is some shadowy sort of price at which supply and demand are equated at zero. But this price is not performing much of a signaling function.