This paper surveys work on reputations in repeated games of incomplete information. We first develop the adverse-selection approach to reputations in the context of a long-lived player, who may be a “normal” type or one of a number of “commitment” types, and who faces a succession of...

An agent can choose to forego benefits from side opportunities and to instead provide benefits to the principal. In return, the principal offers rewards. If this exchange is not contractible, typically repeated interaction will be required to sustain it. This model allows the agent's...

I study a 2-bidder infinitely repeated IPV first-price auction without transfers, communication, or public randomization, where each bidderʼs valuation can assume, in each of the (statistically independent) stage games, one of three possible values. Under certain distributional assumptions, the...

We develop general recursive methods to solve for optimal contracts in dynamic principal-agent environments with hidden states and hidden actions. In our baseline model, the principal observes nothing other than transfers. Nevertheless, optimal incentive-constrained insurance can be attained. We...

Many dynamic incentive problems have primal recursive formulations in which utility promises serve as state variables. We associate families of dual recursive problems with these by selectively dualizing constraints. We make transparent the connections between recursive primal and dual...