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Efficient Online Exchange via Fiat Money

Author

Listed:
  • Jie Xu

    (Electrictal Engineering, UCLA)

  • Mihaela van der Schaar

    (Electrictal Engineering, UCLA)

  • William Zame

    (University of California, Los Angeles)

Abstract

In many online systems, individuals provide services for each other; the recipient of the service obtains a benefit but the provider of the service incurs a cost. If benefit exceeds cost, provision of the service increases social welfare and should therefore be encouraged but the individuals providing the service gain no (immediate) benefit from providing the service and hence have an incentive to withhold service. Hence there is scope for designing a protocol that improves welfare by encouraging exchange. To operate successfully within the confines of the online environment, such a protocol should be distributed, robust, and consistent with individual incentives. This paper proposes and analyzes protocols that rely solely on the exchange of fiat money or tokens. The analysis has much in common with work on search models of money but the requirements of the environment also lead to many differences from previous analyses - and some surprises; in particular, existence of equilibrium becomes a thorny problem and the optimal quantity of money is different.

Suggested Citation

  • Jie Xu & Mihaela van der Schaar & William Zame, 2013. "Efficient Online Exchange via Fiat Money," EIEF Working Papers Series 1315, Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF), revised May 2013.
    • Handle: RePEc:eie:wpaper:1315
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Raphael Espinoza & Dimitrios P. Tsomocos, 2019. "Monetary transaction costs and the term premium," Chapters, in: Financial Regulation and Stability, chapter 8, pages 224-244, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    3. Thomas Wiseman, 2015. "A Note on the Essentiality of Money under Limited Memory," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 18(4), pages 881-893, October.
    4. Takashi Kamihigashi, 2014. "Elementary results on solutions to the bellman equation of dynamic programming: existence, uniqueness, and convergence," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 56(2), pages 251-273, June.
    5. Takashi Kamihigashi, 2014. "An order-theoretic approach to dynamic programming: an exposition," Economic Theory Bulletin, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 2(1), pages 13-21, April.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D51 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Exchange and Production Economies
    • E40 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - General

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