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...

We consider repeated games with private monitoring that are .close. to repeated games with public/perfect monitoring. A private monitoring information structure is close to a public monitoring information structure when private signals can generate approximately the same distribution of the...

The repeated game literature studies long run/repeated interactions, aiming to understand how repetition may foster cooperation. Conditioning future behavior on past play is crucial in this endeavor. For most situations of interest a given player does not directly observe the actions chosen by...

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...

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 stochastic games with an infinite horizon and sequential moves played by an arbitrary number of players. We assume that social memory is finite---every player, except possibly one, is finitely lived and cannot observe events that are sufficiently far back in the past. This class of...

This paper proposes and studies a tractable subset of Nash equilibria, belief-free review-strategy equilibria, in repeated games with private monitoring. The payoff set of this class of equilibria is characterized in the limit as the discount factor converges to one for games where players...

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...

This paper studies the inference of interaction effects (impacts of players' actions on each other's payoffs) in discrete simultaneous games with incomplete information. We propose an easily implementable test for the signs of state-dependent interaction effects that does not require parametric...