Contractual Externalities and Common Agency Equilibria
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David Martimort
This paper characterizes the equilibrium sets of common agency games with direct externalities between principals when they compete with nonlinear prices. Direct externalities arise when the contracting variable of one principal directly affects the other principal's payoff. First, we characterize the set of pure-strategy, symmetric equilibria under complete information of an intrinsic common agency game. This set of equilibria is large because of the presence of price-output offers by the principals that are unchosen by the agent in equilibrium. Equilibria exist in which principals offer out-of-equilibrium price-output choices to the agent and induce aggressive, low-price behavior corresponding to marginal-cost pricing in the extreme case. We then show that this equilibrium set of outputs is robust to the possibility that agent refuses any of the offered contracts; the case of delegated agency. Second, we introduce asymmetric information in order to rationalize existing nonlinear pricing contracts. The introduction of asymmetric information has the effect of restricting the set of equilibrium outputs of the intrinsic common agency game.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Topics Article
- Non-robustness of some economic models
- Incentives for Boundedly Rational Agents
- On Non-responsiveness in Adverse Selection Models with Common Value
- Contributions Article
- Competitive Equilibria With Incomplete Markets and Endogenous Bankruptcy
- A One-Period Version of Rubinstein's Bargaining Game
- Upgrading, Degrading, and Intertemporal Price Discrimination
- Adverse Selection and Insurance Contracting: A Rank-Dependent Utility Analysis
- Incomplete Contracts with Cross-Investments
- Communication and Voting with Double-Sided Information
- Signal Jamming in Games with Multiple Senders
- Homothetic or Cobb-Douglas Behavior Through Aggregation
- Advances Article
- The Generalized Linear Production Model: Solvability, Nonsubstitution and Productivity Measurement
- Contagion and State Dependent Mutations
- Rationalization and Incomplete Information
- Contractual Externalities and Common Agency Equilibria
- Market Research and Market Design
