The introduction and widespread use of credit cards increases trading efficiency but, by also increasing the velocity of money, it causes inflation, in the absence of monetary intervention. If the monetary authority attempts to restore pre-credit card price levels by reducing the money supply,...

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices -- seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market....

An adequate description of economic dynamics requires the introduction of a monetary system including default penalties and expectations in a society whose economy utilizes money and credit. This essay notes and discusses several of the factors involved in the use of money and credit in a...

Socialism is conceptualized as a society in which individuals cooperate, distinguished from capitalism, characterized as involving ubiquitous economic competition. Here, I embed a formal model of cooperation in an Arrow-Debreu model, using the Kantian optimization protocol, and define a...

We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that causes prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. This constrained suboptimality of...

Information dissemination and aggregation are key economic functions of financial markets. How intelligent do traders have to be for the complex task of aggregating diverse information (i.e., approximate the predictions of the rational expectations equilibrium) in a competitive double auction...

We propose a criterion for determining whether a local policy analysis can be made in a given equilibrium in an overlapping generations model. The criterion can be applied to models with infinite past and future as well as those with a truncated past. The equilibrium is not necessarily a steady...

This essay is the second of three. The first is nontechnical and in part autobiographical describing the evolution of my approach to developing a micro economic theory of money and financial institutions. This essay is devoted to a mathematical sketch of a closed economic exchange system with...

Economic theory has focused almost exclusively on how humans compete with each other in their economic activity, culminating in general equilibrium (Walras) and game theory (Nash). Cooperation in economic activity is, however, important, and is virtually ignored. Because our models influence our...

Attainment of rational expectations equilibria in asset markets calls for the price system to disseminate agents' private information to others. Markets populated by human agents are known to be capable of converging to rational expectations equilibria. This paper reports comparable market...