The essentiality of money in a trading post economy with random matching

Abstract

Abstract This article studies how the structure of centralized markets can affect efficient allocation in anonymous decentralized trades. In line with previous studies, we show that efficiency in decentralized markets can be sustained in a moneyless finite-number-of-agents setting if agents are patient enough and the price is observed with noise. We additionally show that, if there are no gains from trade, then the price associated with an inactive centralized market is zero irrespective of the noise. Thus, the non-essentiality-of-money result is a more robust phenomenon when the centralized market acts only as a coordination device.