Central bank intervention in large-value payment systems: an experimental approach

Abstract

This experimental study investigates the behavior of banks in a large value payment system. More specifically, we look at 1) the reactions of banks to disruptions in the payment system and 2) the way banks behavior changes to incentives of the central bank. The game used in this experiment is a stylized version of a model of Bech and Garratt (2006) in which each bank can choose between paying in the morning (efficient) or in the afternoon (inefficient) and builds on the game by Abbink et al. (2010). The results show that a positive (bail out) or negative (punishment) incentive steers payments to the inefficient or efficient equilibrium, respectively. In contrast to our expectation, providing detailed information on disruptions steers payments towards the inefficient equilibrium.