Repeated moral hazard and recursive Lagrangeans

This paper shows how to solve dynamic agency models by extending recursive Lagrangean techniques à laMarcet and Marimon (2011) to problems with hidden actions. The method has many advantages with respect to the promised utilities approach (Abreu et al., 1990): it is a significant improvement in terms of simplicity, tractability and computational speed. Solutions can be easily computed for hidden actions models with several endogenous state variables and several agents, while the promised utilities approach becomes extremely difficult and computationally intensive even with just one state variable or two agents.