Few want to do business with a partner who has a bad reputation. Consequently, once a bad reputation is established, it can be difficult to get rid of. This leads on the one hand to the intuitive idea that a good reputation is easy to lose and hard to gain. On the other hand, it can lead to a...

This paper argues that incompleteness of intertemporal financial markets has little effect (on welfare, prices, or consumption) in an economy with a single consumption good, provided that traders are long-lived and patient, a riskless bond is traded, shocks are transitory, and there is no...

We characterize a generalization of discounted logistic choice that incorporates a parameter to capture different views the agent might have about the costs and benefits of larger choice sets. The discounted logit model used in the empirical literature is the special case that displays a...

The authors modify the standard principal-agent model with oral hazard by allowing the contract to be renegotiated after the agent's choice of action and before the observation of the action's consequences. In equilibrium, the agent randomizes over effort levels. The optimal contract gives the...

The authors study the steady states of a system in which players learn about the strategies their opponents are playing by updating their Bayesian priors in light of their observations. Players are matched.at random to play a fixed extensive-form game and each player observes the realized...

In a self-confining equilibrium, each player's strategy is a best response to his beliefs about the play of his opponents and each player's beliefs are correct along the equilibrium path of play. Thus, if a self-confirming equilibrium occurs repeatedly, no player ever observes play that...