Details on the master thesis of Jiang Xin 
“Dynamic Relational Contracts”
In master thesis of Jiang Xin the game theoretical models of Relational contracts are investigated.
This approach is not new in game theory and there are a number of papers on the subject published in leading  game theory journals. Jiang Xin makes an overview on few of this papers, but this overview is not the main part of dissertation. Making the evaluation of Jiang Xins work it is necessary to take in account the real situation with his study, namely the necessity to start game theory only on master courses of our university since in China this was not possible.   This is the reason why he was able to read high level scientific game theory papers only this year.  The time to write the dissertation was short  and this is seen if you read the manuscript. There are some not correctly formulated expressions and the English could be much better.
But the main advantage is that he got new and very interesting results. First of all he is the first to consider n-person relational contracts and as support of relational contracts he selects strong Nash Equilibrium (Nash Equilibrium stable against deviations of coalitions). This is in some sense a revolutionary approach since it is well known that the strong Nash Equilibrium (Nash Equilibrium stable against deviations of coalitions) usually does not exist and because of this is used very rare in game theory models as solution concept, but when it exists it is the best solution which guarantees the stability of an agreement. The next lucky finding is the use of an imputation from the core to define the so called stage money transfers and exactly this enables  the construction of the strong Nash equilibrium situation which  supports the   proposed  transfer scheme using the punishment  against any deviating coalition.
Unfortunately   Jiang Xin starts his research to late, maybe because in the beginning of his master study he did not understand the requirements to master dissertation. And as result he was not ready to present his achievements on the conference and was not ready to write at least a draft of the paper for publication in  scientific  game theory journal.  But as supervisor I think that in 2-3 months this can be done and the basic results are already present in his master dissertation.
My evaluation of his master dissertation is “EXELENT”.

Supervisor,
Professor Leon Petrosyan
06.05.2016