Relational Contracting, Negotiation, and External Enforcement

David Miller, Trond Olsen and Joel Watson

No 2018/8, Discussion Papers from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Business and Management Science

Abstract: We study relational contracting and renegotiation in environments with external enforcement of long-term contractual arrangements. An external, long-term contract governs the stage games the contracting parties will play in the future (depending on verifiable stage-game outcomes) until they renegotiate. In a contractual equilibrium, the parties choose their individual actions rationally, they jointly optimize when selecting a contract, and they take advantage of their relative bargaining power. Our main result is that in a wide variety of settings, in each period of a contractual equilibrium the parties agree to a semi-stationary external contract, with stationary terms for all future periods but special terms for the current period. In each period the parties renegotiate to this same external contract, effectively adjusting the terms only for the current period. For example, in a simple principal-agent model with a choice of costly monitoring technology, the optimal contract specifies mild monitoring for the current period but intense monitoring for future periods. Because the parties renegotiate in each new period, intense monitoring arises only off the equilibrium path after a failed renegotiation.

Keywords: Relational contracts; negotiation; external enforcement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D00 D20 D21 D80 D86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2018-05-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Relational Contracting, Negotiation, and External Enforcement (2020)
Working Paper: Relational Contracting, Negotiation, and External Enforcement (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:nhhfms:2018_008

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