Title
Analyzing Scrip Systems.
Abstract
<P>Scrip systems provide a nonmonetary trade economy for exchange of resources. We model a scrip system as a stochastic game and study system design issues on selection rules to match potential trade partners over time. We show the optimality of one particular rule in terms of maximizing social welfare for a given scrip system that guarantees players' incentives to participate. We also investigate the optimal number of scrips to issue under this rule. In particular, if the time discount factor is close enough to one, or trade benefits one partner much more than it costs the other, the maximum social welfare is always achieved no matter how many scrips are in the system. When the benefit of trade and time discount are not sufficiently large, on the other hand, injecting more scrips in the system hurts most participants; as a result, there is an upper bound on the number of scrips allowed in the system, above which some players may default. We show that this upper bound increases with the discount factor as well as the ratio between the benefit and cost of service. Finally, we demonstrate similar properties for a different service provider selection rule that has been analyzed in previous literature.</P>
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1287/opre.2014.1260
Operations Research
Keywords
DocType
Volume
game theory,repeated games,operations,currency
Journal
62
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
0030-364X
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
10
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kris Johnson1382.32
David Simchi-Levi21449151.53
Peng Sun342026.68