The origin of money: a survey of the contemporary literature

Introducing money into a scheme of general economic equilibrium entails manifold problems, which have emerged in many contributions to the literature. Some of these problems have been adequately addressed at the level of micro-based approaches which can be traced back to the monetary theory of Carl Menger. In this survey we shall review such issues, after which we shall attempt to illustrate the contribution to solving the problem of the origin of money offered by the literature on transaction and information costs inspired by Menger’s monetary theory