LEASING A DEPRECIATING ASSET. Gerald Posner speculates on a renegotiated prenuptial agreement (I agree, the terminology is awkward, but there it is) between Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren Woods.

Elin signed a prenuptial agreement reportedly worth $20 million after 10 years of marriage, not considered a large payout for someone who was already as successful as Tiger by then. (The tightlipped Woods camp, almost obsessive about releasing any personal information after Tiger’s blundering interviews with GQ in 1997, has never acknowledged the existence of the first prenup, although it’s been widely reported).

But in light of a string of women coming forward to say they had affairs with Tiger since his marriage, Elin has demanded that the prenup be rewritten, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker reported Wednesday. “The links legend’s spouse is reportedly being paid a hefty seven-figure amount—immediately transferred [sic] into an account she alone controls—to stick with her husband,” Zwecker wrote. “At this point, the couple needed to remain married for 10 years in order for Woods’ wife to collect a splitsville settlement of $20 million. I’m being told that time frame has been shortened—and the dollar amount increased ‘substantially.’”

The lawyer familiar with the couple’s negotiations told The Daily Beast that Tiger also has agreed to shorten the original prenup to seven years from the date of marriage, meaning it will vest in another two. And the revised agreement provides for a staggered schedule of payments spread out over five years that could be worth upward of $75 million. So for Elin to collect $80 million, she’ll need to stay with Tiger another seven years, be a dutiful wife in showing up with him at social events and in public as if they were still the perfect couple, and sign a nondisclosure form that will prevent her from ever telling her story. Even if she lasts only two more years, she’ll still walk away with nearly twice what she was entitled to under the original prenup.

Paid to stick with her husband. That's almost enough to make people consider more favorably the radical feminist equivalence between marriage and prostitution.

There's a game-theoretic thesis nailed to Newmark's Door. He starts with an excerpt from a Eugene Robinson column in the Washington Post.

I was going to critique Woods's technique of adultery, or at least his apparent selection of playmates, as measured against a theory about philandering developed by my colleague Roxanne Roberts, who has spent years covering the capital's libidinous social scene for The Post. Roberts postulates that famous, powerful men who stray would be smart to choose women who have just as much to lose if the liaison were exposed. Some ultra-rich tycoon's young trophy wife, say, would fit that criterion. Cocktail waitresses and nightclub hostesses, not so much.

From which Professor Newmark draws a connection to Oliver Williamson.

Which sounds like a good example of a theory by Nobel Prize winner Oliver Williamson in "Credible Commitments: Using Hostages to Support Exchange," American Economic Review, Sept. 1983. (Very short summary here.)

Reason ahead, think back. Those tycoons very likely locked their arm candy into the kind of prenuptial agreement that Mr Woods signed off on, in which straying soon involves high costs, and in which the opportunity for a depreciated asset to stray is attenuated. That leaves Mr Woods with the groupies.