Markets are competitive if and only if P = NP

According to a new paper on arxiv, markets are fully competitive if and only if P equals en-pee—the unsolved computer science conjecture asking whether solutions that are easy to verify are also easy to find. The paper draws an unexpected connection between market efficiency and computational complexity, suggesting they're fundamentally equivalent. The claim has attracted attention on Hacker News, though the research community will likely scrutinize whether this deep equivalence holds.

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