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and data scientists. In his book, Walras introduced an ideal type of economic
society in which buyers and sellers not only have full information about the
prices in the market, but could also participate in market transactions in an
unrestricted (frictionless) manner. Markets are characterized by a high
degree of organization and transactions, such as auctions, are centralized,
and the terms of trade are made known openly to all market participants
who, in turn, are given the opportunity to react to the prevailing prices.
Since both Charles Dickens and Leon Walras had experienced the polit-
ical and economic upheavals after the Industrial Revolution, their work,
especially that of the latter, regardless of how distant it may be from us in
time, could still be useful as we experience the digital revolution, which,
undoubtedly, is more significant in its impacts than previous industrial
revolutions.
For the purpose of this chapter the significance of Walras’ Elements of Pure
Economics is twofold. First, it can be read as the first book in economics that
portrays the economy in the era of ICT and big data, and, second, based on
that portrait, the entire market can be unmanned, with all the trading media
replaced by machines. Of course Walras did not mention anything explicitly
about ICT in Elements, but the entirety of his thought experiments regarding
general equilibrium analysis cannot be taken seriously without some proper
assumptions related to the availability of ICT. In fact, the Walrasian auction-
eer, his brilliant intellectual invention, can be interpreted as a platform (net-
work of supercomputers) employing a large number of robot traders or
software agents to perform cloud trading. In this sense, one may treat his
perception of markets as IoE, which came to the mind of this genius way
ahead of his time.
This idea of an unmanned market (the Walrasian auctioneer) was then
further developed by socialist economists, notably, Oscar Lange (1904–
1965) (Lange & Taylor, 1938) and Abba Lerner (1903–1982) (Lerner,
1944), becoming the foundation of the socialist economy and economic
planning. Along this intellectual line, the idea of cybernetics, which originated
from the earlier servo-mechanism (automation) and was popularized by
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), was introduced into economics by Oscar
Lange, who also authored his posthumous publication Introduction to Eco-
nomic Cybernetics (Lange, 1970). In the 1970s and 1980s, economic cybernet-
ics was further pursued by Western economists under a new subject title,
referred to as optimal control theory (Kendrick, 1981).
Despite its long burgeoning period of development, the idea of an
unmanned market, that is, economic planning as a substitute for the market
economy, has been constantly questioned and challenged, and constitutes