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\address
Professor John Geanakoplos
Department of Economics
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520
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Dear John:
Here's the paper I mentioned. My more general ideas on contracts
are not written up at present. The key idea is that the ability to
write contracts properly motivating each party depends on each party
knowing something about the other's business and costs of doing his part.
As I remarked, some people might suffer the theological disappointment
of expecting infinite reward and getting only a finite reward but with
infinite expected value. It occurs to me that if the successive recipients
would cooperate and promise to share, each could get infinite reward after
all, assuming that the procession of saints (or pardoned sinners) continued
indefinitely and that the reward was storable and transferable. It isn't
obvious how fast they could afford to increase their consumption of reward.
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Sincerely,
John McCarthy
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