IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ise/remwps/wp03792025.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Devil’s Dung? Money as a mechanism of generalized reciprocity in human societies

Author

Listed:
  • Eduardo C. Ferraciolli
  • Francesco Renzini
  • Tanya V. Araújo
  • Flaminio Squazzoni

Abstract

St. Francis of Assisi (1181/82-1226) famously called money the devil’s dung, and indeed money is often associated with greed, inequality, and corruption. Drawing on Nowak’s five rules for the evolution of cooperation, we argue here that money promotes the formation of circuits of generalized reciprocity across human groups that are fundamental to social evolution. In an evolutionary tournament, we show that money exchange is an evolutionarily stable strategy that promotes cooperation without relying on the cognitive demands of direct reciprocity or reputation mechanisms. However, we also find that excessive liquidity can be detrimental because it can distort the informational value of money as a signal of past cooperation, making defection more profitable. Our results suggest that, in addition to institutions that promoted trust and punishment, the emergence of institutions that regulated the money supply was key to maintaining generalized reciprocity within and across human groups.

Suggested Citation

  • Eduardo C. Ferraciolli & Francesco Renzini & Tanya V. Araújo & Flaminio Squazzoni, 2025. "The Devil’s Dung? Money as a mechanism of generalized reciprocity in human societies," Working Papers REM 2025/0379, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa.
    • Handle: RePEc:ise:remwps:wp03792025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://rem.rc.iseg.ulisboa.pt/wps/pdf/REM_WP_0379_2025.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bigoni, Maria & Camera, Gabriele & Casari, Marco, 2020. "Money is more than memory," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 99-115.
    2. Ostroy, Joseph M. & Starr, Ross M., 1990. "The transactions role of money," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: B. M. Friedman & F. H. Hahn (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 1, pages 3-62, Elsevier.
    3. Masahiko Aoki, 2013. "Institutions as cognitive media between strategic interactions and individual beliefs," Chapters, in: Comparative Institutional Analysis, chapter 17, pages 298-312, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    4. Maria Bigoni & Gabriele Camera & Marco Casari, 2019. "Partners or Strangers? Cooperation, Monetary Trade, and the Choice of Scale of Interaction," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 11(2), pages 195-227, May.
    5. Manvir Singh & Luke Glowacki, 2022. "Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model," Post-Print hal-04038902, HAL.
    6. Jaeweon Shin & Michael Holton Price & David H. Wolpert & Hajime Shimao & Brendan Tracey & Timothy A. Kohler, 2020. "Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 11(1), pages 1-8, December.
    7. Nigel Dodd, 2014. "The Social Life of Money," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10319.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Maria Bigoni & Gabriele Camera & Marco Casari, 2019. "Cooperation among strangers with and without a monetary system," Working Papers 19-01, Chapman University, Economic Science Institute.
    2. Bigoni, Maria & Camera, Gabriele & Casari, Marco, 2020. "Money is more than memory," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 99-115.
    3. Gabriele Camera & Dror Goldberg & Avi WeissBar-Ilan, 2020. "Endogenous Market Formation and Monetary Trade: An Experiment," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 18(3), pages 1553-1588.
    4. Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro & Lagos, Ricardo & Wright, Randall, 2016. "Introduction to the symposium issue on money and liquidity," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 1-9.
    5. Marco Lambrecht & Andis Sofianos & Yilong Xu, 2025. "Does Mining Fuel Bubbles? An Experimental Study on Cryptocurrency Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 71(3), pages 1865-1888, March.
    6. Etienne Farvaque & Alexander Mihailov & Alireza Naghavi, 2018. "The Grand Experiment of Communism: Discovering the Trade-Off between Equality and Efficiency," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 174(4), pages 707-742, December.
    7. Alary, Pierre & Desmedt, Ludovic, 2019. "Les divers courants de l’institutionnalisme monétaire : un état des lieux. Introduction au dossier « Autour de l’institutionnalisme monétaire »," Revue de la Régulation - Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoirs, Association Recherche et Régulation, vol. 26.
    8. Starr, Ross M., 1999. "Why is there Money? Convergence to a Monetary Equilibrium in a General Equilibrium Model with Transaction Costs," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt253553nn, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    9. John Duffy, 1998. "Monetary theory in the laboratory," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Sep, pages 9-26.
    10. Starr, Ross M., 2002. "Existence of Uniqueness of "Money" in General Equilibrium: Natural Monopoly in the Most Liquid Asset," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt660465rm, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    11. Hirokazu Takizawa, 2017. "Masahiko Aoki’s conception of institutions," Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 523-540, December.
    12. Antonio Mele & Radoslaw Stefanski, 2019. "Velocity in the Long Run: Money and Structural Transformation," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 31, pages 393-410, January.
    13. Starr, Ross M., 2002. "General Equilibrium in a Segmented Market Economy with Convex Transaction Cost: Existence, Efficiency, Commodity and Fiat Money," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt81x2x4zk, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    14. Guilherme Carmona, 2021. "On the optimality of monetary trading," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 71(3), pages 1121-1160, April.
    15. Gabriele Camera & Cary Deck & David Porter, 2019. "Do Economic Inequalities Affect Long-Run Cooperation & Prosperity?," Working Papers 19-09, Chapman University, Economic Science Institute.
    16. Giuseppe Mastromatteo & Luigi Ventura, 2007. "The origin of money: A survey of the contemporary literature," International Review of Economics, Springer;Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRS), vol. 54(2), pages 195-224, June.
    17. Konstantin Chatziathanasiou & Svenja Hippel & Michael Kurschilgen, 2020. "Property, Redistribution, and the Status Quo," Munich Papers in Political Economy 02, Munich School of Politics and Public Policy and the School of Management at the Technical University of Munich.
    18. Luigi Doria & Luca Fantacci, 2018. "Evaluating complementary currencies: from the assessment of multiple social qualities to the discovery of a unique monetary sociality," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 52(3), pages 1291-1314, May.
    19. Herrmann-Pillath Carsten, 2014. "Naturalizing Institutions: Evolutionary Principles and Application on the Case of Money," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 234(2-3), pages 388-421, April.
    20. Nenovsky, Nikolay, 2019. "Money as a coordinating device of a commodity economy: old and new, Russian and French readings of Marx. Part 1. Monetary theory of value [La monnaie comme dispositif de coordination d'une économie," Revue de la Régulation - Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoirs, Association Recherche et Régulation, vol. 26.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models
    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ise:remwps:wp03792025. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sandra Araújo (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://rem.rc.iseg.ulisboa.pt/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.