Two alternative approaches to compute a market equilibrium (in static analysis) are either to minimize the differences (either using abs() or a quadratic diff) between supply-demand quantities and prices in a given market or maximise the total surplus.
Which are the advantages of these two approaches and when to prefer one over the other?
I noticed that many partial equilibrium models (e.g. 1, 2 (p 42)) use the max surplus method, but I wonder why.