Dynamic contracting: an irrelevance theorem

Péter Eső and Balázs Szentes

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper generalizes a conceptual insight in dynamic contracting with quasilinear payoffs: the principal does not need to pay any information rents for extracting the agent's “new” private information obtained after signing the contract. This is shown in a general model in which the agent's type stochastically evolves over time, and her payoff (which is linear in transfers) depends on the entire history of private and any contractible information, contractible decisions, and her hidden actions. The contract is offered by the principal in the presence of initial informational asymmetry. The model can be transformed into an equivalent one where the agent's subsequent information is independent in each period (type orthogonalization). We show that for any fixed decision–action rule implemented by a mechanism, the agent's rents (as well as the principal's maximal revenue) are the same as if the principal could observe and contract on the agent's orthogonalized types after the initial period. We also show that any monotonic decision–action rule can be implemented in a Markovian environment satisfying certain regularity conditions, and we provide a simple “recipe” for solving such dynamic contracting problems.

JEL-codes: D82 D83 D86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-gth and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published in Theoretical Economics, 30, January, 2017, 12(1), pp. 109-139. ISSN: 1933-6837

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/69403/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:69403

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().