We bring together the theories of duality and dynamic programming. We show that the dual of an additively separable dynamic optimization problem can be recursively decomposed using summaries of past Lagrange multipliers as state variables. Analogous to the Bellman decomposition of the primal...

Several recent papers have proposed recursive Lagrangian-based methods for solving dynamic contracting problems. These methods give rise to Bellman operators that incorporate either a dual inf-sup or a saddle point operation. We give conditions that ensure the Bellman operator implied by a dual...