This paper studies reputation effects in games with a single long-run player whose choice of stage-game strategy is imperfectly observed by his opponents. The authors obtain lower and upper bounds on the long-run player's payoff in any Nash equilibrium of the game. If the long-run player's...

Imagine that one player, the "incumbent," competes with several "entrants." Each entrant competes only with the incumbent, but obs erves play in all contests. Previous work shows that as more and more entrants are added, the incumbent's reputation may dominate play of the game, if the entrants...

Many incentives in organizations arise not through explicit formal incentive contracts but rather implicitly through career concerns. This paper models career concerns through agents trying to manipulate the market assessment of their future productivity. The information flow from current...

The paper is a first attempt at modeling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations. A member's current incentives are affected by his past behavior and, because his track record is observed only with noise, by the group's past behavior as well. The paper thus studies...

As was shown by M. Dewatripont (1986), optimal long-term contracts under asymmetric information are generally not time-consistent. This paper fully characterizes the equilibrium of a two-period procurement model with commitment and renegotiation. It also analyzes whether renegotiated long-term...

Consider a long-term relationship between a seller and buyer whose valuation (for a durable good) is private. As trade progresses, the valuation will be partially revealed and it may be possible for the parties to commit ex ante not to take advantage of this. The authors analyze this first by...