Book ChapterDOI
International Institutions: Two Approaches
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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
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Domestic Sources of Regional Regimes: The Evolution of Nuclear Ambiguity in the Middle East
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluate the contribution of this literature to understanding the absence of a nuclear regime in the Middle East and the likely paths which may lead to one in the future.
Thinking About the World We Make
TL;DR: The authors argue that the reality of world politics is more complex than dreamt of in current theories and argue that it should instead be viewed as a complex system, rather than a simple system.
Journal ArticleDOI
Integrating integration theory: neo-functionalism and international regimes
TL;DR: In this paper, Integrating integration theory: Neo-functionalism and international regimes, the authors propose a method to integrate integration theory with functionalism in the context of international regimes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Choosing low-cost institutions in global governance
Kenneth W. Abbott,Benjamin Faude +1 more
TL;DR: Low-cost institutions (LCIs) as discussed by the authors have been shown to provide substantive and political benefits based on their low costs, including reduced risk, malleability and flexibility, as well as many of the general cooperation benefits provided by all types of institutions.
References
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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.