We consider a model where multiple principals repeatedly offer short-term contracts to three or more agents with private information. Under low discounting there exists a simple class of mechanisms that sustains all equilibrium allocations that could be generated by arbitrarily complex...

This paper uses a vertical relational contract between two firms to explore the implications of trade credit when the ability to repay is not observed by the supplier.  Trade credit limits the supplier's possibilities to punish the cashless downstream firms and termination may be used in...

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...

We analyze the Spence education game in experimental markets. We compare a signaling and a screening variant, and we analyze the e¤ect of increasing the number of employers from two to three. In all treatments, there is a strong tendency to separate. More e¢cient workers invest more often and...

This paper analyzes repeated games in which it is possible for players to observe the other players' past actions without noise but it is costly. One's observation decision itself is not observable to the other players, and this private nature of monitoring activity makes it difficult to give...

We study an infinitely repeated Bertrand game in which an i.i.d. demand shock occures in each period. Each firm recieves a private signal about the demand shock at the beginning of each period. At the end of each period, information about both the underlying demand shock and the rival's prices...

There are many situations in which buyers have a significant stake in what a firm learns about their demands. Specifically, any time that price discrimination is possible on an individual basis and repeat purchases are likely, buyers possess incentives for strategic manipulation of demand...

Consumer privacy and the market for customer information in electronic retailing are investigated. The value of customer information derives from the ability of firms to identify individual consumers and charge them personalized prices. Two settings are studied, a closed privacy regime in which...

This paper studies repeated games with private monitoring where players make optimal decisions with respect to costly monitoring activities, just as they do with respect to stage-game actions. We consider the case where each player can observe other players' current-period actions accurately...

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 the...