Book ChapterDOI
International Institutions: Two Approaches
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
In this article, it is pointed out that in situations involving strategic bargaining, even formal theories, with highly restrictive assumptions, fail to specify which of many possible equilibrium outcomes will emerge (Kreps 1984:16).Abstract:
Contemporary world politics is a matter of wealth and poverty, life and death. The members of this Association have chosen to study it because it is so important to lives and those of other people — not because it is either aesthetically attractive or amenable to successful theory-formulation and testing. Indeed, we would be foolish if we studied world politics in search of beauty or lasting truth. Beauty is absent because much that we observe is horrible, and many of the issues that we study involve dilemmas whose contemplation no sane person would find pleasing. Deterministic laws elude us, since we are studying the purposive behavior of relatively small numbers of actors engaged in strategic bargaining. In situations involving strategic bargaining, even formal theories, with highly restrictive assumptions, fail to specify which of many possible equilibrium outcomes will emerge (Kreps 1984:16). This suggests that no general theory of international politics may be feasible. It makes sense to seek to develop cumulative verifiable knowledge, but we must understand that we can aspire only to formulate conditional, context-specific generalizations rather than to discover universal laws, and that our understanding of world poltitics will always be incomplete.read more
Citations
More filters
Dissertation
What explains alignment? Armenian-Iranian cooperation in the context of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
Dissertation
Norge i nordområdene: En analyse av Norges rolle i etableringen av internasjonalt og regionalt samarbeid i nordområdene
TL;DR: Norge i nordomradene as mentioned in this paper : En analyse av Norges rolle i etableringen av internasjonalt og regionalt samarbeid i Nørgård.
Book ChapterDOI
Gender in International Relations Theory
TL;DR: In fact, it should not be surprising that the study of gender is largely absent from the field of international relations theory, long the preserve of what radical feminists would call "male-stream" realist thinkers.
Book ChapterDOI
Dogmatic Anti-dogmatism: Learning from Chris Brown
TL;DR: The authors argue that Brown does not fit easily into any of the prevailing theoretical categories and that his dogmatic anti-dogmatism on this issue provides us with a model for pluralism in International Relations (IR).
Toward the End of Inter-Paradigm Debates : Theoretical Synthesis of Grand Unified Model
TL;DR: In this article, a Grand Unified Model (GUM) is proposed to provide a comprehensive explanation of global phenomena set forth not in the state-centric but in the individual human-centric manner.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness
TL;DR: In this article, the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations, in modern industrial society, is examined, and it is argued that reformist economists who attempt to bring social structure back in do so in the "oversocialized" way criticized by Dennis Wrong.
Book
The Evolution of Cooperation
TL;DR: In this paper, a model based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game was developed for cooperation in organisms, and the results of a computer tournament showed how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
TL;DR: The Economic Institutions of Capitalism as mentioned in this paper is a seminal work in the field of economic institutions of capitalism. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 528-530.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Evolution of Cooperation
R. B. Greene,Robert Axelrod +1 more
TL;DR: A model is developed based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game to show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.