Dynamic relational contracts under complete information

Jonathan Thomas and Timothy Worrall

Journal of Economic Theory, 2018, vol. 175, issue C, 624-651

Abstract: This paper considers a long-term relationship between two agents who both undertake an action or investment that produces a joint benefit. Agents have an opportunity to expropriate some of the joint benefit for their own use. Agents have quasi-linear preferences. Two cases are considered: where agents are risk averse but where limited liability constraints do not bind, and where agents are risk neutral and subject to limited liability constraints. We ask how to structure the investments and division of the surplus over time to avoid expropriation. In the risk-averse case, the dynamics of actions and surplus may or may not be monotonic depending on whether or not a first-best allocation can be sustained. Agents may underinvest but never overinvest. If the first-best allocation is not sustainable, there is a trade-off between risk sharing and surplus maximization; surplus may not be at its constrained maximum even in the long run and the “amnesia” property of pure risk-sharing models fails to hold. In contrast, in the risk-neutral case there may be an initial phase in which one agent overinvests and the other underinvests. Both actions and surplus converge monotonically to a stationary state, where surplus is maximized subject to the self-enforcing constraints.

Keywords: Relational contracts; Self-enforcement; Limited commitment; Risk sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 C73 D86 D91 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053118300413
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Dynamic Relational Contracts under Complete Information (2014)
Working Paper: Dynamic Relational Contracts under Complete Information (2014)
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:eee:jetheo:v:175:y:2018:i:c:p:624-651

DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2018.02.004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell

More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().