Repeated Bargaining with Persistent Private Information
分析同一买方和卖方之间的重复合同谈判，买方拥有持久但非永久的私人信息。均衡中形成信息周期：卖方激进要求成功后会再次激进，失败则转为温和报价，且温和价格随周期递减。
The paper analyses repeated contract negotiations involving the same buyer and seller where the contracts are linked because the buyer has persistent (but not fully permanent) private information. The size of the surplus being divided is specified as a two-state Markov chain with transitions that are synchronized with contract negotiation dates. Equilibrium involves information cycles triggered by the success or failure of aggressive demands made by the seller. Because there is persistence in the Markov chain generating the surplus, a successful demand induces the seller to make another aggressive demand in the next negotiation, since the buyer's acceptance reveals that the current surplus is large. Rejection of an aggressive demand, on the other hand, leads the seller to be pessimistic about the size of the surplus in the next contract, so the seller makes a "soft" offer that is sure to be accepted. Then, after several such offers have been accepted, the seller is optimistic enough to again make an aggressive demand, creating an information cycle. An interesting feature of this cycle is that the soft price is not constant, but declines as the cycle continues, so as to offset the buyer's option value of re-starting the cycle when the current state is bad. An explicit mapping is given for the relationship between the basic parameters and the equilibrium prices and quantities; in particular, there is a closed-form solution for the threshold belief that makes the seller indifferent between hard and soft offers.