Do Payment Systems Matter: A New Look

Abstract

In this paper, we consider two alternative pure payments systems—the trade of goods for goods, or barter, and trade using intrinsically valueless fiat money. Here, the term payment system refers to the method of executing mutually beneficial trades, and ‘pure’ means that each method of exchange is considered exclusively. Each payment system is examined in an economy with location-specific commodities, and households consist of vendor-shopper pairs. The household’s decision problem includes a distance-related transaction cost; that is, the cost of trading with anyone from another location increases as the distance from the home location increases. We then ask, is the equilibrium set of consumption goods—and the quantity of each type—invariant to whether the vendor or the shopper pays the transaction cost? The answer is that in economies with monetary settlements, invariance fails.