Competitive Supply of Money in a New Monetarist Model

Whether currency can be efficiently provided by private competitive money suppliers is arguably one of the fundamental questions in monetary theory. It is also one with practical relevance because of the emergence of multiple competing financial assets as well as competing cryptocurrencies as means of payments in certain class of transactions. In this paper, a dual currency version of Lagos and Wright (2005) money search model is used to explore the answer to this question. The centralized market sub-period is modeled as infinitely repeated game between two long lived players (money suppliers) and a short lived player (a continuum of agents), where longetivity of the players refers to the ability to influence aggregate outcomes. There are multiple equilibria, however we show that equilibrium featuring lowest inflation tax is weakly renegotiation proof, suggesting that better inflation outcome is possible in an environment with currency competition.