Imperfect recognizability and coexistence of money and higher-return assets

Existing solutions to the problem of coexistence of money and higher-return substitutes that rely on imperfect recognizability of the substitutes adopt extreme assumptions: they either have a zero cost of counterfeiting the substitutes or omit plausible refinements that would rule out pooling equilibria. Here coexistence is obtained with a general distribution of positive counterfeiting costs within a signaling-game framework in which the intuitive criterion is invoked. Moreover, if the cost of counterfeiting is small, then any monetary equilibrium that satisfies the intuitive criterion necessarily exhibits coexistence. A continuity assumption on off-equilibrium beliefs is also considered. It is satisfied by equilibria with small use of substitutes, but not by cash-in-advance equilibria.