We base a contracting theory for a start-up firm on an agency model with observable but nonverifiable effort, and renegotiable contracts. Two essential restrictions on simple contracts are imposed: the entrepreneur must be given limited liability, and the investor’s earnings must not decrease...

We consider a repeated duopoly game where each firm privately chooses its investment in quality, and realized quality is a noisy indicator of the firm’s investment. We focus on dynamic reputation equilibria, whereby consumers ‘discipline’ a firm by switching to its rival in the case that...

This note characterizes the set A¡∞ of actions of player ¡ that are uniquely rationalizable for some hierarchy of beliefs on an arbitrary space of uncertainty. It is proved that for any rationalizable action a¡ for the type t¡, if a¡ belongs to A¡∞ and is justified by conjectures...

This paper studies infinite-horizon stochastic games in which players observe noisy public information about a hidden state each period. We find that if the game is connected, the limit feasible payoff set exists and is invariant to the initial prior about the state. Building on this invariance...

We investigate whether two players in a long-run relationship can maintain cooperation when the details of the underlying game are unknown. Specifically, we consider a new class of repeated games with private monitoring, where an unobservable state of the world influences the payoff functions...

Much of the repeated game literature is concerned with proving Folk Theorems. The logic of the exercise is to specify a particular game, and to explore for that game specification whether any given feasible (and individually rational) value vector can be an equilibrium outcome for some...

We investigate whether two players in a long-run relationship can maintain cooperation when the details of the underlying game are unknown. Specifically, we consider a new class of repeated games with private monitoring, where an unobservable state of the world influences the payoff functions...

In repeated normal-form (simultaneous-move) games, simple penal codes (Abreu, 1986, 1988) permit an elegant characterization of the set of subgame-perfect outcomes. We show that the logic of simple penal codes fails in repeated extensive-form games. By means of examples, we identify two types of...

We study perfect information games with an infinite horizon played by an arbitrary number of players. This class of games includes infinitely repeated perfect information games, repeated games with asynchronous moves, games with long and short run players, games with overlapping generations of...

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public-monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in...