Introduction

This special issue brings together a set of papers in contract theory. Some of these papers date back many years and are well known by researchers in the field, but their circulation has been limited due to the lack of dissemination through widely distributed journals. One of the purposes of this special issue is to make this literature available to a wider audience. Thus James Mirrlees's "The Theory of Moral Hazard and Unobservable Behaviour" (1975), Eric Maskin's "Nash Equilibrium and Welfare Optimality" (1977), Bengt Holmström's "Managerial Incentive Problems—A Dynamic Perspective" (1982), and Eric Maskin and John Moore's "Implementation and Renegotiation" (1987) appear in print in a widely available form for the first time. All of these papers have been rigorously refereed, but with the editors mindful of the danger of meddling too much with the original content. These influential contributions are highly relevant for a number of recent articles on contract theory. Thus, we also bring some of these papers together in this issue. All the recent submissions have gone through the usual refereeing procedure for the Review, and appear here on their own merits.