The goal of this paper is to study how informational frictions affect asset liquidity in OTC markets in a laboratory setting. The experiments replicate an OTC market similar to the one used in monetary and financial economics (Shi, 1995; Trejos and Wright, 1995; Duffie, Garleanu, and Pedersen, 2005):...

This paper adopts mechanism design to tackle the central issue in monetary theory, namely, the coexistence of money and higher-return assets. I describe an economy with pairwise meetings, where fiat money and risk-free capital compete as means of payment. Whenever fiat money has an essential...

I apply mechanism design to quantify the cost of inflation that can be attributed to monetary frictions alone. In an environment with pairwise meetings, the money demand that is consistent with a constrained-efficient allocation takes the form of a continuous correspondence that can fit the data...

We study economies with an essential role for liquid assets in transactions. The model can generate multiple stationary equilibria, across which asset prices, market participation, capitalization, output and welfare are positively related. It can also generate a variety of nonstationary...

We study an over-the-counter (OTC) market with bilateral meetings and bargaining where the usefulness of assets, as means of payment or collateral, is limited by the threat of fraudulent practices. We assume that agents can produce fraudulent assets at a positive cost, which generates endogenous...

We investigate how informational frictions affect trading in decentralized markets in theory and in a laboratory setting. Subjects, matched pairwise at random, trade divisible commodities that have different private values for a divisible asset with a common value (interpreted as money). We...