By Rumen Kostadinov, Aditya V. Kuvalekar
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics | February 2022
Kuvalekar, A., Kostadinov, R. (2022). Learning in Relational Contracts. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 14(1)
Microeconomics, February 2022
We study relational contracts between a firm and a worker with mutual uncertainty about match quality. The worker's actions are publicly observed and generate both output and information about the match quality. We show that the relational contracts may be inefficient. We characterize the inefficiency through a holdup problem on the contemporaneous output. In the frequent action limit, these inefficiencies persist if and only if information degrades at least at the same rate at which impatience vanishes. We characterize optimal relational contracts and show that they involve actions that yield both a lower payoff and less information than another action.
Aditya Kuvalekar is a microeconomist whose primary research area is information economics. His research examines how changes in information environments shape individual and collective behavior, with applications ranging from protests and voting to interactions within organizations. A second strand of his work focuses on market design, including problems of land acquisition from groups and school choice when students have non-standard preferences. His research has been published in leading economics journals, including The American Economic Review, The RAND Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, and Journal of Economic Theory.
