Monnaie et marché. Un point de vue critique sur les modèles de prospection

Search models devoted to money theory greatly help in solving some unsettled problems mainly because they deal explicitly with the organisation of transactions and with the way individual agents meet and bargain. The purpose of this paper is to try to assess their importance for the general theory of market economies. Search-theoretic approach to money opens new perspectives but at the same time makes emerge old problems. In particular it seems now impossible not to wonder whether the choice of a collective organisation of exchange is or not a problem analogue to that of a technique of production or that of a bundle of consumption. Does it make sense to try to determine endogenously at the same time the choice of the rules of the game and the best way of playing them? A critical examination of basic search models may come to conclude that their main benefit is to reveal the dead ends of standard equilibrium theory rather than to save it from its traditional flaws in money theory. Classification JEL : A1, E00