A REPRESENTATION THEOREM FOR RIESZ SPACES AND ITS APPLICATIONS TO ECONOMICS

We show that a Dedekind complete Riesz space which contains a weak unit e and admits a strictly positive order continuous linear functional can be represented as a subspace of the space L(1) of integrable functions on a probability measure space in such a way that the order ideal generated by e is carried onto L(infinity). As a consequence, we obtain a characterization of abstract M-spaces that are isomorphic to concrete L(infinity)-spaces. Although these results are implicit in the literature on representation of Riesz spaces, they are not available in this form. This research is motivated by, and has applications in, general equilibrium theory in infinite dimensional spaces.