General equilibrium is investigated with N commodities deliverable at T dates traded spot and futures at 1⁄2 N 2T 3 dated commodity-pairwise trading posts. Trade is a resource-using activity recovering transaction costs through the spread between (bid) wholesale) and ask (retail) prices (pairwise rates of exchange). Budget constraints are enforced at each trading post separately implying demand...

In an economy with commodity-pairwise trading posts and transaction costs, commodity money is endogenously determined in general equilibrium. Absent double coincidence of wants, the lowtransaction cost commodity (with the narrowest proportional bid/ask price spread) becomes the common medium of exchange. JEL Classification: C62, E40

Executive Summary The lack of market information represents a significant impediment to market access especially for smallholder poor farmers: it substantially increases transaction costs and reduces market efficiency. For any one crop, the marketing chain consists of multiple middlemen, each taking a margin at every stage of the chain, and price variations in space and time are often large and...

E xchange rate is an important factor influencing price indices of exported goods of a country in different ways. Imported intermediate commodity is one of the important ways by which the change in exchange rate affects price indices of the exported goods. Using the input-output table of Iran for the year 2001, this paper investigates the impact of exchange rate devaluation on price ...

We consider mechanisms that provide traders the opportunity to exchange commodity i for commodity j, for certain ordered pairs ij. Given any connected graph G of opportunities, we show that there is a unique mechanism MG that satisfies some natural conditions of “fairness” and “convenience”. Let M(m) denote the class of mechanisms MG obtained by varying G on the commodity set {1, . . . , m}. We...