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Money and its institutional substitutes: the role of exchange institutions in human cooperation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2017

CAMERON HARWICK Open the ORCID record for CAMERON HARWICK [Opens in a new window]
CAMERON HARWICK*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States
*
*Email: charwick@gmu.edu
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Abstract

This paper offers an increasing returns model of the evolution of exchange institutions building on Smith's dictum that ‘the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market’. Exchange institutions are characterized by a tradeoff between fixed and marginal costs: the effort necessary to execute an exchange may be economized by up-front ‘investment’ in strategies to facilitate the publication and accounting of trading histories. Increases in the size of the exchange network select for higher-fixed-cost exchange institutions, beginning with autarky, through various intermediate stages, and finally to mass monetary exchange. By identifying the relevant fixed costs of money and its institutional substitutes across time, the paper both accounts for the persistence of pre-monetary exchange institutions, despite the ‘inevitability’ of monetary exchange that seems to be a feature of traditional models of the origin of money, and illuminates the forces driving the transition from one to another.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , August 2018 , pp. 689 - 714
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2017 

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