but who will monitor the monitor suppose that providing incentives for a group of individuals in a strategic context requires a monitor to detect their deviations what about the monitor s deviations to address this question i propose a contract that makes the monitor responsible for monitoring and thereby provides incentives even when the monitor s observations are not only private but costly too i also characterize exactly when such a contract can provide monitors with the right incentives to perform in doing so i emphasize virtual enforcement and suggest its implications for the theory of repeated games jel c78 d23 d82 d86

learning your earning are labor income shocks really very persistent in this paper we examine the risk situation facing individuals in the labor market the current consensus in the literature is that the labor income process has a large random walk component we argue two points first the estimates of persistence from income data appear to be upward biased due to the omission of heterogeneity in income pro les across the population that would be implied for example by a human capital model with heterogeneity when we allow for dierences in pro les the estimated persistence falls from 0 99 to about 0 8 moreover the main evidence against pro le heterogeneity in the existing literature that the autocorrelations of income changes are small and typically negative is also replicated by the pro le heterogeneity model we estimate casting doubt on the previous interpretation of this evidence second we embed this process in a life cycle model to examine how it alters individuals consumption saving decision we assume that as seems plausible individuals do not know their pro les exactly at the beginning of life but learn in a bayesian way with successive income observations we nd that learning is very slow and aects consumption decision throughout the life cycle the model generates substantial rise in consumption inequality over the life cycle which matches empirical observations deaton and paxson 1994 moreover the shape of the age inequality pro le is non concave as in the data but unlike in a model with very persistent shocks finally the consumption pro les of college graduates are steeper than those of high school graduates in the model consistent with the data because they face a wider dispersion of and hence uncertainty about income growth rates overall this evidence indicates that income shocks may be signi cantly less persistent than what is currently assumed

market power of local cable television franchises evidence from the effects of deregulation the 1989 cable act eliminated most price regulation of cable television operators including the right of municipalities to enforce price terms in franchise agreements deregulation was justified at least partially by the contention that competition from other entertainment media eliminated any market power of cable franchises we examine the value at sale of existing cable systems before and after deregulation assuming that this value represents the expected present value of future profits deregulation had the predicted negligible effect on profits in cities with significant broadcast competition however profits appear to have increased in areas where the competition from broadcast television was less severe we explore several explanations for this increase and conclude that significant market power is the most plausible explanation

supply chain relationships and contracts the impact of repeated interaction on capacity investment and procurement consider a firm developing an innovative product due to market pressures production must begin soon after the product development effort is complete which requires that an upstream supplier invests in capacity while the design of the product and production process are in flux because the product is ill defined at this point in time the firms are unable to write court enforceable contracts that specify the terms of trade or the supplier s capacity investment however the firms can adopt an informal agreement relational contract regarding the terms of trade and capacity investment the potential for future business provides incentive for the firms to adhere to the relational contract we show that the optimal relational contract may be complex requiring the buyer to order more than her demand to indirectly monitor the supplier s capacity investment we propose a simpler relational contract and show that it performs very well for a broad range of parameters finally we identify characteristics of the business environment that make relational contracting particularly valuable

skewed wealth distributions theory and empirics invariably across a cross section of countries and time periods wealth distributions are skewed to the right displaying thick upper tails that is large and slowly declining top wealth shares in this survey we categorize the theoretical studies on the distribution of wealth in terms of the underlying economic mechanism generating skewness and thick tails further we show how these mechanisms can be micro founded by the consumption saving decisions of rational agents in speci c economic and demographic environments finally we map the large empirical work on the wealth distribution to its theoretical underpinning

optimal collusion with internal contracting abstract in this paper two firms play an infinitely repeated bertrand game and each firm has an agent who produces the firm s output and holds private information about production costs the colluding firms fix prices and allocate market shares based on their agents information we develop a model of collusion in which firms use the presence of agents as a strategic opportunity to restrict their incentives to distort private information we show that such firm behavior may expand the scope of optimal collusion whether market allocation schemes are asymmetric or symmetric

multimarket contact imperfect monitoring and implicit collusion abstract this paper presents a theoretical foundation to the possibility that multimarket contact enhances firms ability to sustain implicit collusion when firms operate in a single market and cannot perfectly monitor their opponents choices it is impossible to achieve efficiency even if these firms have a long term strategic relationship we show that when firms encounter each other in a number of distinct markets and the extent of this market contact is large efficiency can be approximately sustained by a perfect equilibrium this efficiency with imperfect monitoring holds under almost the same condition on the discount factor as with perfect monitoring journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c72 c73 d43 l11 l22 l41

on measuring competitive viability and monopoly power in cable an empirical cost approach this study provides empirical evidence concerning the economic feasibility of competition in the local market for video delivery services using responses from the fcc s 1995 cost survey we jointly estimate a translog cost function with factor share equations to evaluate subadditivity the fitted total cost of each firm is compared with the cost of two firms providing the same total output in eleven different market scenarios although costs were mildly superadditive in the vast majority of cases they were lower when one firm provided the output average cost savings with respect to a monopoly were fairly small ranging from 1 37 with a 10 market overlap to 5 05 with a complete overbuild we also calculated marginal cost from the fitted total cost equation and a price for cable services derived from the fcc survey data using these results and rubinovitz s price elasticity of 1 46 we estimated that reregulation had a regulatory effectiveness of 0 3251 and held prices to 40 5 of the monopoly level

balanced bayesian mechanisms in the transferable utility case a number of authors have identified conditions on beliefs that guarantee the existence of bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms with balanced transfers we present a new easy to interpret condition and we show that it is strictly more general than all the other conditions found in the literature we also study conditions guaranteeing the bayesian implementability of all social decision rules with balanced budget mechanisms

using subjective income expectations to test for excess sensitivity of consumption to predicted income growth abstract we test for precautionary saving and excess sensitivity of consumption to predicted income growth using a 1989 1993 panel survey of italian households that has measures of subjective income and inflation expectations these expectations provide a powerful instrument for predicting income growth the empirical specification controls for predictable changes in labor supply and allows a fairly general specification for the stochastic structure of the forecast error we find that consumption growth is positively correlated with the expected variance of income and uncorrelated with predicted income growth overall the results support the precautionary saving model

is the wto passe the wto has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements ptas should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand off where the wto has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage and is now passing the baton to ptas to finish the job this paper surveys a growing economics literature on international trade agreements and argues on this basis that the wto is not passe rather and subject to some caveats this survey of research to date suggests that the wto warrants strong support while a more cautious view of ptas seems appropriate

time consistent taxation by a government with redistributive goals abstract in a dynamic economy whose government is interested in both equity and efficiency time consistency problems arise even if the government has access to nondistortionary tax instruments moral hazard in production leads to a nondegenerate distribution of income which the government would like to flatten ex post self enforcing social agreements can mitigate the tendency toward excessive redistribution we investigate the nature of the distortions caused by the time consistency problem and show that in the constrained optimal equilibrium usually a linear tax schedule is imposed this remains true if renegotiation of the social agreement is possible journal of economic literature classification numbers c7 c73 e6 h21

impossibility of collusion under imperfect monitoring with flexible production we show that it is impossible to achieve collusion in a duopoly when 1 goods are homogenous and firms compete in quantities 2 new imperfect information arrives continuously without sudden events and 3 firms are able to respond to this new information quickly the result holds even if we allow for asymmetric equilibria or monetary transfers the intuition is that the flexibility to respond to new information quickly unravels any collusive scheme and that signals about the aggregate behavior only cannot be used effectively to provide individual incentives via transfers our result applies both to a simple stationary model and a more complicated one with prices following a mean reverting markov process

collusion with almost no information we analyze noncooperative collusion in an infinitely repeated bertrand game where each of the n firms receives a privately observed i i d cost shock in each period and firms only and privately observe whether they have won the unit mass of consumers no other information is available and no communication is allowed we prove that there exist equilibria in private strategies approximating first best profits when firms are sufficiently patient in particular productive efficiency obtains in the limit

the interaction of implicit and explicit contracts in repeated agency abstract in a repeated principal agent model in which the agent s actions are observable to the principal but not verifiable in court the agent s incentives derive both from salary payments based on verifiable signals and from implicit promises by the principal of bonuses for good behavior explicit short term contracts are designed to enhance the effectiveness of the infinite horizon implicit contract between principal and agent in a constrained efficient equilibrium bonuses smooth the consumption path of the risk averse agent by moving in the opposite direction from salaries total consumption and expected discounted utility for the rest of the game journal of economic literature classification numbers c7 c73 d8

did household consumption become more volatile i show that after accounting for predictable variation arising from movements in real interest rates preferences and income shocks liquidity constraints and measurement errors volatility of household consumption in the us increased by 25 percent between 1970 and 2004 the increase was lower than that of volatility of family income nonwhite and those with less than 13 years of education for whom there was no differential increase in income volatility experienced a significantly larger increase in volatility of household consumption substantial differences in wealth and access to credit markets point to the main reason for this divide jel d12 d14 e21 j15

relational incentive contracts standard incentive theory models provide a rich framework for studying informational problems but assume that contracts can be perfectly enforced this paper studies the design of self enforced relational contracts i show that optimal contracts often can take a simple stationary form but that self enforcement restricts promised compensation and affects incentive provision with hidden information it may be optimal for an agent to supply the same inefficient effort regardless of cost conditions with moral hazard optimal contracts involve just two levels of compensation this is true even if performance measures are subjective in which case optimal contracts terminate following poor performance jel c73 d82 l14

a belief based approach to the repeated prisoners dilemma with asymmetric private monitoring abstract this paper extends the belief based approach to the repeated prisoners dilemma with asymmetric private monitoring we first find that the previous belief based techniques t sekiguchi efficiency in repeated prisoners dilemma with private monitoring j econ theory 76 1997 345 361 v bhaskar i obara belief based equilibria in the repeated prisoners dilemma with private monitoring j econ theory 102 2002 40 69 cannot succeed when players private monitoring technologies are sufficiently different we then modify the previous belief based approach by letting the player with smaller observation errors always randomize between cooperate and defect along the cooperative path of the play we show that with vanishing observation errors efficiency and a folk theorem can be approximated using our modified belief based strategies

individual learning and cooperation in noisy repeated games 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 and or the monitoring structure each player privately learns the state over time but cannot observe what the opponent learned we show that there are robust equilibria in which players eventually obtain payoffs as if the true state were common knowledge and players played a belief free equilibrium we also provide explicit equilibrium constructions in various economic examples copyright 2014 oxford university press

strategic buyers and privately observed prices a model of finitely repeated price competition between two sellers with differentiated goods and a large buyer is analyzed the set of pure strategy sequential equilibria is investigated under public and private monitoring with private monitoring i e when prices are not observable to the competing sellers all sales are made by the better seller and the set of repeated game equilibrium payoffs coincides with the stage game subgame perfect equilibrium payoffs this is in sharp contrast to the game with perfect monitoring where the folk theorem obtains journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d43

the folk theorem with imperfect public information the authors study repeated games in which players observe a public outcome that imperfectly signals the actions played they provide conditions guaranteeing that any feasible individually rational payoff vector of the stage game can arise as a perfect equilibrium of the repeated game with sufficiently little discounting the central condition requires that there exist action profiles with the property that for any two players no two deviations one by either player give rise to the same probability distribution over public outcomes the results apply to principal agent partnership oligopoly and mechanism design models and to one shot games with transferable utilities copyright 1994 by the econometric society

private monitoring in auctions abstract we study infinitely repeated first price auctions in which a bidder only learns whether or not he won the object while repetition of the stage game equilibrium is the unique nash equilibrium in public strategies with patient bidders there are simple nash equilibria in private strategies that improve on bid rotation sequential rationality is appropriately captured by essentially perfect bayesian equilibrium epbe which ignores behavior after irrelevant histories our main result is the construction of epbea that improve upon bid rotation assuming symmetry the exclusionary schemes of skrzypacz and hopenhayn tacit collusion in repeated auctions j econ theory 114 2004 153 169 including asymptotically efficient ones are supported as epbea

non price concessions and the effect of franchise bidding schemes on cable company costs among the potentially important problems with franchise bidding schemes is the possibility that franchisers may extract non price concessions merit goods from competing bidders at the expense of lower prices for plain vanilla service the systematic evidence presented in this paper suggests that the pursuit of such non price concessions in the case of cable franchise competitions is substantial expenditures on non price concessions account for 26 of cable construction costs and 11 of operating costs the pursuit of non price concessions by local franchising authorities appears to have two negative economic efficiency consequences first expenditures on such concessions appear to provide only a limited amount of economic benefits second by raising costs spending on non price concessions inhibits the ultimate level to which prices can be held by franchise bidding schemes

optimal unemployment insurance with human capital depreciation and duration dependence this paper studies the effect of human capital depreciation and duration dependence on the design of an optimal unemployment insurance ui scheme our results partially confirm those obtained in most previous studies benefits should decrease with unemployment duration the optimal program also generates two main novel features which are not present in stationary models first if human capital depreciates rapidly enough during unemployment ui transfers are bounded below by a minimal assistance level that arises endogenously in the efficient program second we study the optimality of imposing a history contingent wage tax after reemployment our numerical simulations based on the spanish and us economies show that the wage tax should decrease with the length of worker s previous unemployment spell and become a wage subsidy for long term unemployed workers as a by product of our study we develop a systematic approach suitable for studying recursively a wide range of dynamic moral hazard problems and other models with similar characteristics

the graph of prisoners dilemma supergame payoffs as a function of the discount factor abstract the set of subgame perfect correlated equilibrium of the infinitely repeated discounted prisoners dilemma depends on the discount factor the graph of the correspondence of these equilibrium payoffs versus the discount factor is derived and presented these results are especially applicable to situations in which there is a random chance of the supergame ending or an exogenous probability of cooperative breakdown

comments on money is privacy by charles kahn james mcandrews and william roberds monetary theory and game theory three classes of models on money closely related to game theoretic models are i search theoretic models ii repeated games in a narrow sense and iii trading post games this note tries to point out the sense of affinity between the theory of microfoundations of money and the theory of repeated games in a broad sense of the term

the distribution of wealth and fiscal policy in economies with finitely lived agents we study the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and intergenerational transmission of wealth financial markets are incomplete exposing agents to both labor and capital income risk we show that the stationary wealth distribution is a pareto distribution in the right tail and that it is capital income risk rather than labor income that drives the properties of the right tail of the wealth distribution we also study analytically the dependence of the distribution of wealth of wealth inequality in particular on various fiscal policy instruments like capital income taxes and estate taxes and on different degrees of social mobility we show that capital income and estate taxes can significantly reduce wealth inequality as do institutions favoring social mobility finally we calibrate the economy to match the lorenz curve of the wealth distribution of the u s economy

reputation and turnover 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 turnover equilibria in which a low quality realization is penalized by lowering future demand of the firm that delivered this quality we determine when a turnover equilibrium that gives higher welfare than the static equilibrium exists and how this relates to market fundamentals we also derive comparative statics properties and we characterize a set of investment levels and hence payoffs that turnover equilibria sustain

perfect communication equilibria in repeated games with imperfect monitoring this paper introduces an equilibrium concept called perfect communication equilibrium for repeated games with imperfect private monitoring this concept is a refinement of myerson s myerson r b 1982 optimal coordination mechanisms in generalized principal agent problems j math econ 10 67 81 communication equilibrium a communication equilibrium is perfect if it induces a communication equilibrium of the continuation game after every history of messages of the mediator we provide a characterization of the set of corresponding equilibrium payoffs and derive a folk theorem for discounted repeated games with imperfect private monitoring

is more information always better a case in credit markets this paper studies the impact of behavioral and non behavioral information contained in consumer credit reports on the credit market a repeated game of incomplete information between a borrower and a sequence of lenders is considered lenders beliefs regarding the borrower s type depend on the borrower s historical loan performance and other informative signals it is established that for low beliefs strategic defaults occur in equilibrium as the borrower defaults on his loans despite having the ability to repay them further as the ancillary signals become increasingly informative of the borrower s type the range of beliefs over which strategic defaults occur expands this increase in strategic defaults highlights an unintended negative effect of allowing informative signals to influence beliefs on the upside the informative signals allow lenders to learn the borrower s type more quickly

the wealth distribution in bewley economies with capital income risk abstract we study the wealth distribution in bewley economies with idiosyncratic capital income risk we show analytically that under rather general conditions on the stochastic structure of the economy a unique ergodic distribution of wealth displays a fat tail

profit sharing with workers facilitates collusion among firms we show how profit sharing by firms with workers facilitates collusion among firms in a dynamic oligopoly environment with uncertain demand we first show that firm profits can always be increased by tying wages to market conditions the optimal agreement takes the form of an option and features partial sharing because increased sharing raises the expected price wage differential but reduces price wage variability we then show that given any cartel there exist market conditions such that simply giving some expected profit to workers raises expected firm profits via the transfer s impact on the incentive to cheat on the cartel

collusion with persistent cost shocks we consider a dynamic bertrand game in which prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed cost shock in each period although cost shocks are independent across firms within a firm costs follow a first order markov process we analyze the set of collusive equilibria available to firms emphasizing the best collusive scheme for the firms at the start of the game in general there is a trade off between productive efficiency whereby the low cost firm serves the market in a given period and high prices we show that when costs are perfectly correlated over time within a firm if the distribution of costs is log concave and firms are sufficiently patient then the optimal collusive scheme entails price rigidity firms set the same price and share the market equally regardless of their respective costs when serial correlation of costs is imperfect partial productive efficiency is optimal for the case of two cost types first best collusion is possible if the firms are patient relative to the persistence of cost shocks but not otherwise we present numerical examples of first best collusive schemes

simultaneous allocation of bundled goods through auctions assessing the case for joint bidding we study the costs and benefits of allowing joint bidding in multiple simultaneous first price sealed bid auctions for bundled goods with private values joint bidding raises the prospect of higher allocative efficiency but also reduces the number of bidders resulting in an ambiguous net impact on seller revenue the research was carried out using laboratory experiments in which groups of up to six buyers competed for eight bundles of two separable goods each the main results show that in our experimental environment allowing joint bidding increases efficiency by 11 3 and revenue by 9 4 the research has immediate applications to the sale of public forest stands that arbor a mixture of species for this reason we explore how the results are affected by excess supply the presence of dominant firms and the removal of an allocation rule requiring multiple bidders under certain circumstances

investing in a relationship a principal can make an investment anticipating a repeated relationship with an agent but the agent may appropriate the returns through ex post bargaining i study how this holdup problem and efficiency depend on the contracting environment when investment returns are observable informal contracts ex post can be more efficient than formal contracts as they induce higher investment ex ante the principal invests not only to generate direct returns but also to improve relational incentives unobservability of returns increases the principal s ability to appropriate the returns but reduces her ability to improve incentives the optimal information structure depends on bargaining power

modelling cognitively bounded rationality an evaluative taxonomy abstract since its origins in the 1950s the notion of bounded rationality has been incorporated into economic theory using an array of methodological approaches this paper presents a taxonomy by which these approaches can be categorized and understood evaluating each approach against a range of important criteria at a time when the foundations of economic theory are being re examined this paper should be viewed as a first step towards an assessment of the appropriate role that this more realistic view of cognition should take in different areas of economic theory and also of the desirable characteristics of models that incorporate it

repeated insurance contracts and moral hazard abstract an attempt is made to account for the frequently observed phenomenon of insurance companies offering discounts to clients who possess a favorable record of past claims we argue that such discounts provide a mechanism which enables both insurer and insured to counteract the inefficiency which arises from moral hazard

how robust is the folk theorem the folk theorem of repeated games has established that cooperative behavior can be sustained as an equilibrium in repeated settings early papers on private monitoring and a recent paper of cole and kocherlakota games and economic behavior 53 2005 59 72 challenge the robustness of this result by providing examples in which cooperation breaks down when players observe only imperfect private signals about other players actions or when attention is restricted to strategies with finite memory this paper shows that cole and kocherlakota s result is an artefact of a further restriction that they impose we prove that the folk theorem with imperfect public monitoring holds with strategies with finite memory as a corollary we establish that the folk theorem extends to environments in which monitoring is close to public yet private

cournot outcome and optimal collusion an example abstract we give an example of a repeated cournot oligopoly game with price uncertainty in which the optimal collusion is the cournot outcome thus there is no advantage from dynamic collusion the example is quite robust with respect to probability specifications and the number of firms

political economy of mechanisms we study the optimal mirrlees taxation problem in a dynamic economy in contrast to the standard approach where the taxation mechanism is operated by a benevolent planner with full commitment power we focus on economies in which policy decisions are made by self interested politicians who cannot commit to policies the society controls politicians using elections we show that the provision of incentives to politicians can be partly separated from redistribution across agents and that political economy constraints can be modeled as introducing additional aggregate distortions in the dynamic mirrlees problem we provide conditions under which the political economy distortions persist or disappear in the long run if the politicians are as patient as the agents the best sustainable mechanism leads to an asymptotic allocation where the aggregate distortions arising from political economy disappear in contrast when politicians are less patient than the citizens positive aggregate labor and capital taxes remain even asymptotically we conclude by providing a brief comparison of centralized

at will relationships how an option to walk away affects cooperation and efficiency abstract we theoretically and experimentally examine the effects from adding a simple empirically relevant action to a repeated partnership the option to walk away manipulating both the value of the outside option and its relative distribution among the partners we examine the behavior of human subjects in a repeated prisoners dilemma in particular we examine the degree of cooperation and the form of punishments used our findings indicate that cooperation rates are broadly unaffected by the value of the common outside option but that the selection of supporting punishments in relationship defections or walking away are dictated by individual rationality in contrast to the symmetric results when outside options for partners are asymmetric we find stark selection effects over cooperation with the potential for very high and very low efficiency dependent on the precise division rule

the political economy of indirect control this paper characterizes the efficient sequential equilibrium when a government uses indirect control to exert its authority we develop a dynamic principal agent model in which a principal a government delegates the prevention of a disturbance such as riots protests terrorism crime or tax evasion to an agent who has an advantage in accomplishing this task our setting is a standard dynamic principal agent model with two additional features first the principal is allowed to exert direct control by intervening with an endogenously determined intensity of force which is costly to both players second the principal suffers from limited commitment using recursive methods we derive a fully analytical characterization of the likelihood intensity and duration of intervention the first main insight from our model is that repeated and costly interventions are a feature of the efficient equilibrium this is because they serve as a punishment to induce the agent into desired behavior the second main insight is a detailed analysis of a fundamental tradeoff between the intensity and duration of intervention which is driven by the principal s inability to commit finally we derive sharp predictions regarding the impact of various factors on likelihood intensity and duration of intervention we discuss these results in the context of some historical episodes