The stationary sunspot equilibria of a simple overlapping generations
economy with heterogeneous
agents are considered. These equilibria are known to be suboptimal. The focus
of the paper is on the efficacy,
based on welfare economic considerations and informational
requirements, of government policy in such an
environment. The main result is that
knowledge of the sunspot
equilibrium net trades, weak interval-type information on two
parameters, and
weak set-type information on the location of some optimal stationary
allocation
is sufficient to induce a competitive equilibrium that is a Pareto optimal
Pareto improvement over the
sunspot allocation, which has the further property of reaching
a Pareto optimal stationary allocation in finite time.
The results are interpreted as demonstrating that, in a simple model
with a sunspot environment,
policy is very effective and welfare economic considerations lead to
stabilization.