Equilibrium models solve a slightly different problem than the ones markets do. They tell us about prices in a world where rational, identical, and completed-adjustment agents meet, which is a nice theoretical result but not particularly useful for traders, firms, or supply chains.

The alternative is not to abandon rigor — it is to model behavior that is genuinely adaptive. Traders who learn. Firms that imitate. Shocks that propagate through network topology rather than dissipating smoothly across representative agents. The methods are now mature: agent-based models, calibrated networks, non-linear stochastic dynamics. The bottleneck is empirical: calibrating these models to real data and showing where they beat the standard ones.

And that is the research goal.