Emergence of Money as a Medium of Exchange: An Experimental Analysis

[507968]达菲一个社会形成的最重要的惯例之一就是接受至少一种物品作为“交换媒介”。当一件物品在社会中成为一种交换媒介时，许多代理人对该物品不感兴趣，因为他们自己的消费或生产中使用该物品，但他们在交易中接受该物品，并理性地期望他们能够用它来交换对自己具有内在价值的商品。货币理论家面临的挑战是确定决定哪些物品将获得交换媒介地位的因素。这个项目的目标是构建清泷-赖特模型的实验分析，这是唯一一个可以在不依赖法律限制的情况下解释为什么某些储存成本相对较高或回报率占主导地位的商品仍然可以作为交换媒介的货币模型。Kiyotaki和Wright只提供了他们模型的平稳均衡的特征。它们没有提供任何关于一种商品如何成为交换媒介的说明。因此，本实验的目的之一是测试处于清泷-赖特环境中的个体，是否会随着时间的推移，学会采用与模型所暗示的相同的商品作为交换媒介，从而在均衡中被如此使用。通过这种方式，实验将检验平衡预测对非平衡游戏产生的动态的稳健性。有一大类重要的经济模型与清泷-赖特模型具有相同的属性，即它们都是具有战略互补性的动态博弈。该实验的第二个目标是提供关于具有这些属性的简单游戏中玩法演变的经验观察，这样我们就可以为这些环境所引发的学习动态建模提供经验基础。这样的学习动态模型可以与基于具有战略互补性的游戏研究的模型进行比较，后者没有明确的动态收益结构。

9507968 Duffy One of the most important conventions a society develops is the acceptance of at least one object as a "medium of exchange". An object becomes a medium of exchange in a community when many agents who have no interest in that object for their own consumption or use in production nevertheless accept the object in trade with the rational expectation that they will be able to trade it for goods which are of intrinsic value to themselves. The challenge to monetary theorists is to identify the factors that determine which object(s) will acquire the status of a medium of exchange. The objective of this project is to construct an experiment analysis of the Kiyotaki-Wright model, the only model of money that can explain without relying on legal restrictions why certain goods that have relatively high storage costs or are dominated in rate of return can nevertheless serve as media of exchange. Kiyotaki and Wright only provide a characterization of the stationary equilibria of their model. They do not provide any account of how a commodity emerges as a medium of exchange. One purpose of this experiment, therefore, is to test whether individuals placed in the Kiyotaki-Wright environment learn over time to adopt the same commodities as exchange media as the model implies will be so used in equilibrium. In this way the experiment will be a test of the robustness of the equilibrium predictions to dynamics created by out-of-equilibrium play. There is a large class of important economic models that share with the Kiyotaki-Wright model the properties that they are dynamic games with strategic complementarities. A second goal of the experiment is to provide a body of empirical observations on the evolution of play in a simple game having these properties so that we will have an empirical basis for modeling the learning dynamics evoked by such environments. Such models of learning dynamics can then be compared with models based upon the study of games with strategic complementarities tha t do not have an explicitly dynamic payoff structure.