This article contrasts supporting partnerships through relational contracting and supporting partnerships through formal legal institutions. A large population of players interact in bilateral relationships. Efficiency requires cooperation, but cheating yields a higher short‐term payoff. There is a positive probability that the maximum feasible payoff available to a partnership decreases. Opportunistic behavior makes it impossible to realize the efficient outcome. A legal system can lead to efficient contracting. Without such a system, productive relationships arise in equilibrium if it is costly to initiate new relationships. This type of relational contracting tends to make partnerships last longer than is efficient.

Experiments, ethnography, and introspection provide evidence economic agents do not act to maximize their narrowly defined self interest. Expanding the domain of preferences to include the utility of others provides a coherent way to extend rational choice theory. There are two approaches for including extended or social preferences in strategic models. One posits that agents have extended preferences, but maintains the conventional assumption that these preferences are stable. Prominent examples of this approach permit agents to exhibit concern for status, inequality, and social welfare. The other approach permits the strategic context to determine the nature of individual preferences. Context-dependent preferences can capture the possibility that agents are motivated in part by reciprocity. They may sacrifice personal consumption in order to lower the utility of unkind agents or to raise the utility of kind agents. This paper surveys the evidence in favor of social preferences and describes the implications of the leading theoretical models of extended preferences. It presents behavioral assumptions that characterize different types of social preferences. It investigates the extent to which social preferences may arise as the limit of evolutionary processes. It discusses the relationship between norms of reciprocity and social preferences in repeated interactions.

SOCIAL CAPITAL describes circumstances in which individuals can use membership in groups and networks to secure benefits. This formulation follows

This paper presents models in which one agent must decide whether to trust another, whose motives are uncertain. Reliability can only be communicated through actions. In this context, it pays for people to build a reputation based on reliable behaviour; someone becomes credible by consistently providing accurate and valuable information or by performing useful services. The theory provides a justification for long-term arrangements without binding contracts. It also describes those situations where it pays an agent to cash in on his reputation.

This paper presents a model of intertemporal price discrimination. A fixed number of sellers produce a homogeneous good. Consumers with different preferences enter the market in each period and leave when they make a purchase. The sellers typically vary their prices over time, charging a high price in most periods, but occasionally cutting the price to sell to a large group of customers with a low reservation price. In some equilibria, all stores lower their price at the same time and to the same level.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Econometric Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Econometrica.

This article proposes definitions of lying, deception, and damage in strategic settings. Lying depends on the existence of accepted meanings for messages but does not require a model of how the audience responds to messages. Deception does require a model of how the audience interprets messages but does not directly refer to consequences. Damage requires consideration of the consequences of messages. Lies need not be deceptive. Deception does not require lying. Lying and deception are compatible with equilibrium. I give conditions under which deception must be damaging.

We add a round of pre-play communication to a finite two-player game played by a population of players.Pre-play communication is cheap talk in the sense that it does not directly enter the payoffs.The paper characterizes the set of strategies that are stable with respect to a stochastic dynamic adaptive process.Periodically players have an opportunity to change their strategy with a strategy that is more successful against the current population.Any strategy that weakly improves upon the current poorest performer in the population enters with positive probability.When there is no conflict of interest between the players, only the efficient outcome is stable with respect to these dynamics.For general games the set of stable payoffs is typically large.Every efficient payoff recurs infinitely often.