Fundamentals, Beliefs, and the Origin of Money: A Search Theoretic Perspective

This survey aims at introducing readers to the main features of search theoretic, monetary paradigms, as anticipated in earlier contributions by Jones, Oh, and Iwai, thoroughly formulated in the seminal papers by Kiyotaki and Wright, and subsequently developed in several directions by the same and other authors. The perspective of our analysis will be critical and analytic, and will mainly focus on the delicate trade-off between fundamentals and beliefs which, in our view, underlies the most intriguing results presented in this branch of the literature.