We show that a competitive banking system is inconsistent with an optimum quantity of private money. Because bankers cannot commit to their promises and the composition of their assets is not publicly observable, a positive franchise value is required to induce the full convertibility of bank liabilities. Under perfect competition, a positive franchise value can be obtained only if the return o...

The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) is responsible for managing its liabilities for redundant research reactors and other active facilities concerned with the development of the UK nuclear technology programme since 1947. These liabilities include irradiated graphite from a variety of different sources including low irradiation temperature reactor graphite (the Windscale Piles 1 & 2, British...

2 Pension assets exist to defease the benefit promises made by plan sponsors to participants and beneficiaries—in other words, the pension liability. It follows that pension investment policies should be set in a way that explicitly integrates the exposures of the pension liability. The traditional approach to pension investing has excluded the risks of the liability, which has resulted in port...

Legal and technological changes have made private banknote issue, or its electronic equivalent, possible. We construct a model where private liabilities circulate, either by themselves or alongside outside money. We provide results on existence and multiplicity of equilibria and characterize dynamics near steady states. Our results support Friedman in that circulating private liabilities are as...

This study reports on computational experiments for an agent-based labor market model with adaptive choice and refusal of worksite partners and with endogenously evolving worksite behaviors. Two treatment factors are experimentally varied: market structure; and ex ante capacity constraints on potential work ooers and job openings. Particular attention is focused on experimentally determined cor...

We focus on syntactic aspects of differential awareness that give rise to contractual disputes. Boundedly rational parties use a common language, but do not share a common understanding of the world, leading to ambiguity in both syntactic and semantic forms. In contractual relationships, ambiguity leads to disagreement and disputes. We show that the agents may prefer simpler less ambiguous cont...