An Economy with Personal Currency: Theory and Evidence
Abstract
Is personal currency issued by participants sufficient to operate an economy efficiently, with no outside or government money? Sahi and Yao (1989) and Sorin (1996) constructed a strategic market game to prove that this is possible. We conduct an experimental game in which each agent issues her personal IOUs, and a costless efficient clearinghouse adjusts the exchange rates among them so the markets always clear. The results suggest that if the information system and clearing are so good as to preclude moral hazard, any form of information asymmetry, and need for trust, the economy operates efficiently at any price level without government money. These conditions cannot reasonably be expected to hold in natural settings. In a second set of treatments when agents have the option of not delivering on their promises, a high enough penalty for non-delivery is necessary to ensure an efficient market; a lower penalty leads to inefficient, even collapsing, markets due to moral hazard.Download Info
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Paper provided by Yale School of Management in its series Yale School of Management Working Papers with number amz2448.Length:
Date of creation: 01 Aug 2007
Date of revision: 01 Jan 2009
Handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:amz2448
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Web page: http://icf.som.yale.edu/
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Keywords: Strategic market games; government and individual money; efficiency; experimental gaming;References
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Huber, Juergen & Shubik, Martin & Sunder, Shyam, 2010.
"Three minimal market institutions with human and algorithmic agents: Theory and experimental evidence,"
Games and Economic Behavior,
Elsevier, vol. 70(2), pages 403-424, November.
- Juergen Huber & Martin Shubik & Shyam Sunder, 2007. "Three Minimal Market Institutions with Human and Algorithmic Agents: Theory and Experimental Evidence," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1623, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, revised Jun 2009.
- Juergen Huber & Martin Shubik & Shyam Sunder, 2007. "Three Minimal Market Institutions with Human and Algorithmic Agents: Theory and Experimental Evidence," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1623R, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, revised Jan 2010.
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