Community Currency, 1st ed. 2024
An Evolutionist Institutional Design Approach
Evolutionary Economics and Social Complexity Science Series, Vol. 22

This is the first book to present a new approach of institutional design as an evolutionary applied policy based on coherent conceptualization and methodology, and to study the actuality and implications of diversifying real/virtual community currencies. In contrast to a de facto standard theory, an institutional ecosystem can be composed of various institutions that continue to coexist with changing relative frequencies. In this view, diversified monetary institutions with local rules are feasible and realistic. Community currencies are worldwide attempts to redress such problems as financial instability, chronic stagnation, and decline of communities caused by globalization of the economy. Considering those alternative movements as a new type of policy, ?evolutionist institutional design?, this book clarifies the feasibility and significance of community currencies in the current era of globalization. The book also provides a better understanding than mainstream approaches of such platform institutions as money that determine fundamental means of cognition and action of interacting agents. Money is a symbolically generalized communication medium in the mesodomain that mediates between socioeconomic performance and patterns in the macrodomain and motives and cognitive frameworks in the microdomain. Conventional national systems of money and finance are platform institutions that determine basic replicators for a capitalistic market economy to evolve. In contrast, community currencies conveying both economic and social/cultural values are distinct platform institutions that are expected to endogenously change such basic replicators in outer and inner institutions for agents to a noncapitalistic market economy. These currencies are considered target institutions for ?media design? in the framework of evolutionist institutional design.

​Part I   Theory: Evolutionary Economics and Institutional Ecology.- Chap. 1 Concepts and Framework of Evolutionary Economics (1 Replicators and Interactors in a Multilateral Hierarchy of Artifacts. 2 Socioeconomic Evolution as Mixed Process of Variation, Replication, Selection and Self-organization. 3 Macro-Mezo-Macro Loop: Schematic View of Socioeconomic Structure).- Chap. 2 Institutional Ecology wtih Dynamics, Diversity and Complexity. Part II   Policy: Community Currency Viewed as an Evolutionist Institutional Design Approach.- Chap. 3 Evolutionary Institutional Design (EID) as a New View of Socioeconomic Policy.- Chap. 4 Community Currencies as Integrative Communication Media for EID.- Chap. 5 Media Design.- Chap. 6 Community Dock.- Chap. 7 A Reform Plan of Monetary Institution in Hokkaido. Part III Case Studies: Money Consciousness, Network Analysis and Simulations on Community Currencies .- Chap. 8  Difference of Money Consciousness and View of Reward.- Chap. 9  Network Analysison Circulation of Local Currency.- Chap. 10  Difference of Money Issue Property:  Random Network Simulation of LETS.- Chap. 11 Experimental Study on Electric Community Currencies Using Gaming Simulation.   Conclusion:  Implications of Community Currencies in our Globalization Period.

Presents a coherent, integrative method for theory and application in evolutionary economics Proposes a new approach of socioeconomic policy as evolutionary institutional design based on methods and concepts of evolutionary economics Includes studies of reality and implications of diversifying real and virtual community currencies in the globalization era by new analytical approaches