Among the major properties of a money are that it can serve as (1) a numeraire, (2) a means of exchange, (3) a store of value, and (4) a source of liquidity. Among the lesser properties are that it should be easy to transport and identify, it should be durable, easily divisible, hard to...

In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic...

We define and examine three minimal market games (sell-all, buy-sell, and double auction) in the laboratory relative to the predictions of theory. These closed exchange economies have some cash to facilitate transactions, and include feedback. The experiment reveals that (1) the competitive...

We define and examine the performance of three minimal strategic market games (sell-all, buy-sell, and double auction) in laboratory relative to the predictions of theory. Unlike open or partial equilibrium settings of most other experiments, these closed exchange economies have limited amounts...

A model that includes the cost of producing money is presented and the nature of the inefficient equilibria in the model are examined. It is suggested that if one acknowledges that transactions are a form of production, which requires the consumption resources, then the concept of Pareto...

Is personal currency issued by participants sufficient to operate an economy efficiently, with no outside or government money? Sahi and Yao (1989) and Sorin (1996) constructed a strategic market game to prove that this is possible. We conduct an experimental game in which each agent issues her...

A model that includes the cost of producing money is presented and the nature of the inefficient equilibria in the model are examined. It is suggested that if one acknowledges that transactions are a form of production, which requires the consumption of resources, then the concept of Pareto...

A series of models (kept simple in order to stress the structure of the models and the nature of the questions) are described and problems are posed pertaining to a dynamic economy with various possibilities for the issuance of fiat money, credit and insurance.

The prime purpose of this article is to illustrate some basic problems in the modelling of strategic market games with a single means of exchange or with complete markets. A simple example involving three types of traders trading in three commodities serves to make the points clear.