| Keywords [eng] |
school-based complementary currency, complementary currency, local currency, parallel currency, token economy, field experiment, behavioral economics, circulation velocity, hoarding behavior, spending incentives, incentive design, medium of exchange, case study |
| Abstract [eng] |
65 pages, 7 tables, 3 charts, 43 references. This thesis examines whether a closed-loop, non-redeemable “school currency” can mobilize idle household goods for exchange in a thin market, and which constraints most strongly limit circulation in practice. The work aims to evaluate the feasibility of such a mechanism in a school setting and to identify the main drivers of participation, hoarding, and low velocity. The objectives include synthesizing key design levers from the parallel-currency literature, formalizing a benchmark mechanism for hoarding, implementing an embedded pilot with clear ethical boundaries, and analyzing item-level outcomes before and after a spending nudge. Methodologically, the thesis combines a literature-based mechanism review of complementary/parallel currency designs and circulation constraints, a conceptual/formal benchmark that models “hoarding” as a positive utility share for money under Cobb–Douglas preferences, and a descriptive case study based on transaction logs. Empirically, an eight-week pilot was run in a private school in Vilnius with an accessible pool of ~115 students (grades 5-11). Transactions were recorded as an item-level spreadsheet log; after cleaning, the analytical sample contains 64 entries. Results show that the marketplace functioned but remained low-volume and uneven. For real goods, 39 items were listed and 17 sold (≈44% sale rate), with strong category differences: books sold poorly (3/20; 15%), while toys were highly liquid (12/13; 92%). Trades were often delayed (median time-to-sale ≈8 days). From an accounting perspective, the shop issued 123 units to acquire real goods but recovered only 52 units through resales (≈42%), leaving 71 units effectively tied up in unsold inventory. The main conclusion is that a non-redeemable token can enable real exchange yet still settle into a low-velocity equilibrium when acceptance is thin and the amount of desirable goods is low. In this setting, non-redeemability prevented cash-out leakage, but a substantial share of value became trapped as idle balances and unsold stock. Soft spending incentives can absorb hoarded balances within an active subgroup, but do not automatically solve inventory scarcity or participation gaps. Limitations include the single-school setting, modest and endogenous inventory, adaptive (non-randomized) intervention timing, and anonymity constraints that prevent individual-level tracking. The results have not been published to date, however, it is suitable for development into a short case-study or methods-oriented publication on circulation constraints in micro-scale currency pilots. |
