Sudden transition from equilibrium stability to chaotic dynamics in a cautious tâtonnement model

Discrete time price adjustment processes may fail to converge and may exhibit periodic or even chaotic behavior. To avoid large price changes, a version of the discrete time tâtonnement process for reaching an equilibrium in a pure exchange economy based on a cautious updating of the prices has been proposed two decades ago. This modification leads to a one dimensional bimodal piecewise smooth map, for which we show analytically that degenerate bifurcations and border collision bifurcations play a fundamental role for the asymptotic behavior of the model.