On the multiplicity of monetary equilibria: Green–Zhou meets Lagos–Wright

Green and Zhou relax the assumption, made in early search-based models of monetary exchange, of indivisible money. Their paper and various extensions make much technical progress, and derive some interesting substantive results. In particular, they show there is an indeterminacy of steady-state monetary equilibria. We reconsider this result in the framework of Lagos and Wright, which is more tractable. We show that a similar multiplicity arises, and is much easier to derive and understand. We also compare the results to those in related nonmonetary models, and discuss how they depend on details, including the number of agents and the timing.