Relational Contracting, Negotiation, and External Enforcement
研究了在外部执行长期契约的环境下，关系契约与重新谈判如何相互作用，发现最优契约是半稳定的，当前期条款特殊而未来期条款固定，例如在委托代理模型中当前期监控温和而未来期监控严格。
We study relational contracting and renegotiation in environments with external enforcement of long-term contractual arrangements. A long-term contract governs the stage games that the contracting parties will play in the future (depending on verifiable stage-game outcomes) until they renegotiate. In a contractual equilibrium, the parties choose their individual actions rationally, jointly optimize when selecting a contract, and exercise their relative bargaining power. Our main result is that in a wide variety of settings, the optimal contract is semi-stationary, with stationary terms for all future periods but special terms for the current period. In each period the parties renegotiate to this same contract. For example, in a simple principal-agent model with a choice of costly monitoring technology, the optimal contract specifies mild monitoring for the current period but intense monitoring for future periods. Because the parties renegotiate in each new period, intense monitoring arises only off the equilibrium path after a failed renegotiation.