Information and Monitoring in Repeated Agency of PartnershipProblems

在过去的20年里，我们看到了大量关于带有折扣的重复游戏的重要文献。这一领域的研究受到了一系列理论突破和各种各样的经济应用的刺激，特别是在产业组织、宏观经济学和国际贸易方面。直到最近，所研究的模型都具有“完美监控”的特征：在每个时期，重复博弈中的参与者都准确地知道其他参与者在之前的所有时期采取了什么行动。研究不同领域应用问题的研究者越来越不满足于完全监测假设的现实性，并开发了特殊类型的不完全监测模型。这个项目的贡献包括开发更通用和强大的不完善监测模型，并面对这些更现实的模型中出现的方法问题。传统的代理理论认为，委托人对代理人行为的了解并不比执法机关多。这个项目探索了各种代理超级游戏，这些游戏修改了这个标准的信息结构。在一个这样的模型中，委托人可以观察代理人的行为，而不是执行机构。假设委托人只能签订一期合同的结果被扩展为允许委托人在任何时候自由签订长期合同，根据公开观察的结果，在未来的每个时期为代理人提供工资。合同可以在每一学期结束时重新协商。本研究为将代理理论扩展到动态环境提供了基础。这种理论要求分析者解决递归结构的损失和不均衡协议的协商问题。

The past two decades have seen the development of a large and vital literature on repeated games with discounting. Research in this area has been stimulated both by a succession of theoretical breakthroughs and by a rich variety of economic applications that have emerged, notably in industrial organization, macroeconomics and international trade. Until recently, the models under study shared the feature of "perfect monitoring": in each period, a player in the repeated game knows precisely what actions were taken by other players in all previous periods. Researchers investigating applied problems in different fields became increasingly dissatisfied with the realism of the perfect monitoring assumption and developed models with special kinds of imperfect monitoring. The contribution of this project consists of developing more general and powerful models of imperfect monitoring and confronting the methodological problems that occur in these more realistic models. Traditional agency theory assumes that the principal has no more information about the agent's actions than the enforcement authorities have. This project explores various agency supergames that modify this standard informational structure. In one such model the principal, but not the enforcement agency, can observe the agent's actions. Results obtained by assuming that the principal can only write one-period contracts are extended to allow the principal at any time to freely write long-term contracts, which offer the agent a salary in every future period depending on the publicly observed outcomes. The contracts can be renegotiated at the end of every period. This work provides the basis for extending agency theory to a dynamic setting. Such a theory requires the analyst to solve problems of loss of recursive structure and the negotiation of disequilibrium agreements.