The authors study banking using the tools of mechanism design, without a priori assumptions about what banks are, who they are, or what they do. Given preferences, technologies, and certain frictions - including limited commitment and imperfect monitoring - they describe the set of incentive...

The simple search-theoretic model of fiat money has three symmetric Nash equilibria: all agents accept money with probability 1; all agents accept money with probability 0; and all agents accept money with probability y between 0 and 1. Here the author constructs a nonsymmetric pure strategy...

The authors analyze markets where each of n buyers wants to buy one unit and each of m sellers wants to sell one or more units of an indivisible good. Sellers first set prices, then buyers choose which sellers to visit. There are equilibria where each buyer visits sellers at random and faces a...