Radford and Sweeneys: A quick overview
In the article by Radford, cigarettes clearly serve the role of commodity money, acting as both an excellent store of value and certainly as a medium of exchange (I'm not so sure about as a unit of account but probably there as well. As cigarettes became plentiful, their value dropped relative to other goods (you'd have to give up more cigarettes to get an apple) and so the price of other goods, as denominated in cigarettes, would rise. Similarly, as cigarettes became scarce and thus more valuable, the number of cigarettes you'd have to give up to buy something would fall, which is to say that prices, as denominated in cigarettes, would fall. So just like in a normal monetary economy, a rise in the supply of money (cigarettes) beyond the growth of goods to trade for would lead to inflation and a reduction in the supply of money would lead to deflation. There were a lot of interesting (and difficult) asides to the article. One was the discussion of "Gresham's Law" that "bad money drives out good." When prices were denominated in cigarettes without any gradation for quality (and cigarettes became the de facto currency because they were common, had high value to size, and were sufficiently uniform in quality to avoid the need for lots of haggling), people tended to use "low quality" cigarettes for trading purposes and to hoard "high quality" cigarettes for smoking purposes and as a store of wealth. That is, the existence of low-quality cigarettes meant that you would rarely see a high-quality cigarette appearing in trade.
"England and America are two countries divided by a common language." - George Bernard Shaw
Reading Radford makes Shaw's words ring true. Here is a quick vocabulary guide to WWII era English English.
Money is "clipped" when metal is trimmed from the edges of coins, and sweated when heat is applied to the coin to melt off a bit of valuable metal. Both clipping and sweating were ways of taking off a bit of valuable metal (like gold or silver) off of a coin, while hopefully leaving enough of the coin intact that it could still be used as money.
"Bully" is canned beef...which sounds so...much like English food.
Treacle is a sugary substance made from molasses, and I've tried it, and it's so...much like English food. I could feel my teeth falling out.
Oflags is a contraction of Offizierslagers, a POW camp for officers.
BRCS = British Red Cross Society.
Points are electrical contacts.
R.A. Radford "The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp", Economica, Nov. 1945 (Don't worry about the Bully Mark, Reichmark stuff.)
Now in prison, cigarettes aren't money, instead this is prison money!
The Sweeneys describe an economy where goods (babysitting) are exchanged for money (scrip) at a fixed price level of one piece of scrip exchanges for one-half hour of babysitting. The system works well when there is the right amount of scrip to support the set price as the equilibrium price. When this isn't the case, things fall apart. When things work, people have scrip so use it to get babysitting, and then if they want more scrip, they must do some babysitting themselves. However, when there's not enough scrip in the system, we get a recession. That is, since the value of scrip can't rise due to the fixed prices, people find that one-half hour of babysitting isn't worth the value of hoarding scrip in case of an emergency (scrip's value as a store of value means it's not used as much as a medium of exchange). This problem would go away if more scrip is injected into the system or if the value of scrip is allowed to rise, perhaps to one piece of scrip being worth an hour of babysitting. Then the real value of the (money) scrip supply would be great enough to handle the transactions needed. On the other hand, when there's too much scrip in the system, it would be good if the value of scrip were allowed to fall, perhaps to one piece of scrip being worth 15 minutes of babysitting. Since that isn't allowed, too much scrip in the system wrecks the economy also because people find that they've already go all the scrip they ever plan to need and so see no need to do any babysitting to gain more. In the case of the fixed price level in this economy, too much or too little scrip causes the amount of babysitting done to fall to overly low levels.
Joan and Richard Sweeney, "Monetary Theory and the Great Capital Hill Baby Sitting Co-op Crisis", Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, February 1977 (Don't worry about the math of inflow and outflow of scrip)
Here is a PDF of the original article
For an interesting view on economies like those described by the Sweeney's and how they relate to this topic, see these articles by Paul Krugman: