Dynamic Incentive Contracts under No-Commitment to Periodic Auditing and a Non-retrospective Penalty System

This paper generalizes Khalil’s (1997) static model to a multiperiod one. The associated optimal dynamic contracts are derived and analyzed. At every-period’s equilibrium, the principal conducts no sure auditing. While duplication of the Baron-Myerson-type (1982) contract cannot be optimal, duplication of the Khalil-type (1997) contract can be optimal when the cheating penalty is large or discount factors are small. This implies that static contracts with no-commitment to auditing can describe players’ long-run behavior only under specific conditions. Moreover, our separating and pooling equilibria are compared with Baron and Besanko’s (1984a) and Laffont and Tirole’s (1987) equilibria, respectively.