It is well known that signing publicly
observable contracts with third parties is a means of credibly committing to certain actions and hence may yield strategic advantages.
Previous work on the commitment value of
unobservable contracts has been limited to normal form games and extensive form games in which only one party has the option to sign a
contract. In this paper, we extend the analysis to extensive form games in which both players can sign contracts, and characterize
the set of sequential equilibria. We show that any Nash equilibrium outcome of the original game in which both players receive
more than their individually rational payoffs can be supported as a sequential equilibrium outcome. Therefore, delegation
acts not only as a commitment device to gain advantage over the opponent, but also as a cooperative device to attain Pareto
improvements over the subgame perfect equilibrium outcome.
Keywords Strategic delegation - Unobservable contracts
JEL Classification Numbers C72 - D80 - L13
I would like to thank Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Jean-Pierre Benoit, Alberto Bisin, Boyan Jovanovic, Ehud Kalai, Giuseppe Lopomo,
George Mailath, Efe Ok, Ariel Rubinstein, Andy Schotter, seminar participants at various universities and conferences, and
anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. Support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Program for Economic
Research at Columbia University is also gratefully acknowledged.