Relative efficiencies of antebellum slave farms are suggested by many empirical studies. This paper considers a theoretical aspect of those results using a repeated principal-agent problem. Within its theoretical analysis, with relevance to profitability of slave farms, it will be shown that...

The efficiency wage theory developed by Akerlof (1982) assumes observability of effort and the ability of firm and worker to commit on their effort/wage decisions. We show that, from a game theoretical point of view, we have to understand the firm/worker relationship as a repeated Prisoner's...

We revisit Greif's (1993) analysis of trade between the 11th-century Maghribi traders and present two different models which bring into play, in an essential way, historical features of the Maghribi's organization which had no role in Greif's own analysis. Our reformulation of the Maghribi's...

This paper introduces a model of efficiency-wage competition along the lines put forward by Hahn (1987). Specifically, I analyse a two-firm economy in which employers screen their workforce by means of increasing wage offers competing one another for high-quality employees. The main results are...

In this paper, I explore the consequences of extending the number of firms in an efficiency-wage competition framework. In this setting, I show that the effort function shape is crucial in determining key features of the model economy. Specifically, with a concave (sigmoid) effort function, the...

This paper studies frequent monitoring in a simple infinitely repeated game with imperfect public information and discounting, where players observe the state of a continuous time Brownian process at moments in time of length Δ. It shows that efficient strongly symmetric perfect public...

This paper studies repeated games where the time of repetitions of the stage game is not known or controlled by the players. Many economic situations of interest where players repeatedly interact share this feature, players do not know exactly when is the next time they will be called to play...

This paper studies repeated games where the time of repetitions of the stage game is not known or controlled by the players. Many economic situations of interest where players repeatedly interact share this feature, players do not know exactly when is the next time they will be called to play...

For any given set-valued solution concept, it is possible to consider iterative elimination of actions outside the solution set. This paper applies such a procedure to define the concept of iterated monotone potential maximizer (iterated MP-maximizer). It is shown that under some monotonicity...

In Hart and Kurz (1983), stability and formation of coalition structures has been investigated in a noncooperative framework in which the strategy of each player is the coalition he wishes to join. However, given a strategy profile, the coalition structure formed is not unequivocally determined....