A variety of empirical papers document the coexistence of exclusive and nonexclusive contracts within a given market across a multitude of industries. However, the theoretical literature has not been able to generate a differentiable model with the coexistence of these contracts. I rectify the...

We consider an in nitely repeated reappointment game in a principal- agent relationship. Typical examples are voter-politician or government- public servant relationships. The agent chooses costly effort and enjoys being in office until he is deselected. The principal observes a noisy signal of...

This article introduces a model of decentralized markets with frictions. In our framework, utility is imperfectly transferable between agents that can only trade through bipartite contracting. Economic outcomes are defined as pairs of a flow vector and a price vector.We prove the existence of a...

The marginal cost of effort often increases as effort is exerted. In a dynamic moral hazard setting, dynamically increasing costs create information asymmetry. This paper characterizes the optimal contract and helps explain the popular yet thus far puzzling use of non-linear incentives, for...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle, as originally formulated by Holmstrom (1979), does not hold if the first-order approach is invalid. We introduce a "generalized informativeness principle" that takes into account non-local incentive constraints and holds generically, even...

In many matching environments, agreements are multilateral and/or have externalities. We show that stability in these environments depends on agents' aggregate choice behavior. Two different conditions on aggregate choice ensure a stable outcome exists. One applies when contracts are...

In this paper, we show that stable outcomes exist in matching environments with complementarities, such as social media platforms or markets for patent licenses. Our results apply to both nontransferable and transferable utility settings, and allow for multilateral agreements and those with...

Several weakened substitutability conditions have been proved to be sufficient for stability in many-to-one matching with contracts and to be vital for understanding real-life applications. We examine the roles of these weakened conditions in many-to-many matching with contracts, in particular,...

It is well known that delegating the play of a game to an agent via incentive contracts may serve as a commitment device and hence provide a strategic advantage. Previous literature has shown that any Nash equilibrium outcome of an extensive-form principals-only game can be supported as a...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...