James Fearon, “Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation,” International Organization, 52, 2 (Spring 1998), pp. 269-305.
Summary by Adi
Background: Traditional cooperation theory suggests that different issue areas in international politics can be characterized by different strategic structures (for example, some cooperation issues can be modeled as a coordination game, while others may resemble the Prisoner’s Dilemma). In addition, a central claim of standard cooperation theory concerns international institutions and the shadow of the future: by providing a framework for regular and repeated interaction, channeling information to concerned parties, and lowering the transaction costs of monitoring, international institutions lengthen the shadow of the future, and thereby make cooperation more likely (since states with longer time-horizons will care relatively more about the future payoffs from cooperation, and since the prospect of extended interaction makes the threat of retaliation a meaningful deterrent to cheating).
