Progressive Screening: Long-Term Contracting with a Privately Known Stochastic Process
研究垄断者如何设计长期契约，以应对买方私人知晓其价值演化随机过程及实现值的情况，发现最优契约为静态契约的确定性序列，并随时间逐步排除买方类型。
We examine a model of long-term contracting in which the buyer is privately informed about the stochastic process by which her value for a good evolves. In addition, the realized values are also private information. We characterize a class of environments in which the profit-maximizing long-term contract offered by a monopolist takes an especially simple structure: we derive sufficient conditions on primitives under which the optimal contract consists of a menu of deterministic sequences of static contracts. Within each sequence, higher realized values lead to greater quantity provision; however, an increasing proportion of buyer types are excluded over time, eventually leading to inefficiently early termination of the relationship. Moreover, the menu choices differ by future generosity, with more costly (up front) plans guaranteeing greater quantity provision in the future. Thus, the seller screens process information in the initial period and then progressively screens across realized values so as to reduce the information rents paid in future periods. Copyright , Oxford University Press.