The question of whether private money is viable in the absence of any external control is an old one. We address it in an economy with decentralized trade and information where a self-interested agent, the bank, has the monopoly over the provision of fiat money and is not limited on how much it can issue over time. The assumption of decentralized information is a crucial one and sets this work ...

Application layer networks are software architectures that allow the provisioning of services requiring a huge amount of resources by connecting large numbers of individual computers like in Grid or Peer to Peer computing Controlling the resource allocation in those net works is nearly impossible using a centralized arbitrator The network simulation project CATNET will evaluate a decentralized ...

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps to overcome enforcement problems in anonymous buyer/seller transactions. In a village economy version of the Lagos and Wright (2005) model, agents trading anonymously in decentra...

A major concern in modern monetary theory has been the development of models where money is essential and yet substantive issues can be analyzed in a tractable manner. At the center of this e¤ort is Lagos and Wright (2005). The tractability in their framework is due to the fact that trade alternates between a centralized market and a decentralized market. A widespread view is that money is esse...

Background. Decentralization of care and treatment for HIV infection in Africa makes services available in local health facilities. Decentralization has been associated with improved retention and comparable or superior treatment outcomes, but patient experiences are not well understood. Methods. We conducted a qualitative study of patient experiences in decentralized HIV care in Plateau State,...

The process of payment is fundamental to exchange in a decentralized economy. In production economies, payments often take the form of transfers of inside money, i.e., specialized forms of debt. Associated with each type of inside money is a set of rules that governs both the legitimacy of such transfers as means of extinguishing other debts, and the allocation of the ensuing risks. In this pap...

This paper analyzes the role of money in asset markets characterized by search frictions. We develop a dynamic framework that brings together a model for illiquid financial assets à la Duffie, Gârleanu, and Pedersen, and a search-theoretic model of monetary exchange à la Lagos and Wright. The presence of decentralized financial markets generates an essential role for money, which helps investor...

Public key quantum money can be seen as a version of the quantum no-cloning theorem that holds even when the quantum states can be verified by the adversary. In this work, investigate quantum lightning, a formalization of “collision-free quantum money” defined by Lutomirski et al. [ICS’10], where no-cloning holds even when the adversary herself generates the quantum state to be cloned. We then ...