Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Sep, 1985, Volume 53, Issue 5

Repeated Principal-Agent Games with Discounting

https://doi.org/0012-9682(198509)53:5<1173:RPGWD>2.0.CO;2-M
p. 1173-1198

Roy Radner

In a repeated principal-agent game (supergame) in which each player's criterion is his long-run average expected utility, efficient behavior can be sustained by a Nash equilibrium if it is pareto-superior to a one-period Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, if the players discount future expected utilities, then for every positive epsilon, and every pair of discount factors sufficiently close to unity (given epsilon), there exists a supergame equilibrium that is within epsilon (in normalized discounted expected utility) of the target efficient behavior. These supergame equilibria are explicitly constructed with simple "review strategies."


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