Contrasting temporal difference and opportunity cost reinforcement learning in an empirical money-emergence paradigm.

ABSTRACT: Money is a fundamental and ubiquitous institution in modern economies. However, the question of its emergence remains a central one for economists. The monetary search-theoretic approach studies the conditions under which commodity money emerges as a solution to override frictions inherent to interindividual exchanges in a decentralized economy. Although among these conditions, agents' rationality is classically essential and a prerequisite to any theoretical monetary equilibrium, human subjects often fail to adopt optimal strategies in tasks implementing a search-theoretic paradigm when these strategies are speculative, i.e., involve the use of a costly medium of exchange to increase the probability of subsequent and successful trades. In the present work, we hypothesize that implementing

SUBMITTER: Lefebvre G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6298096 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature