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Realism, Game Theory, and Cooperation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2011
Abstract
Recent work has focused on the problem of how states cooperate in the environment of anarchy. Linked to the ideas of the Prisoners' Dilemma and public goods, that work has provided important insights and lines of research. But it also has problems and limitations, which are explored in the paper. The anarchy approach stresses individual actors' choices and slights questions of how issues are posed and constrained. It takes preferences as given without exploring either the frequency of PD situations or the ways in which preferences are formed and can change. Many of the concepts the framework uses—e.g., cooperation and defection, the distinction between offense and defense, and the nature of power—are problematical. Issues of beliefs, perceptions, norms, and values also lead to a different perspective on cooperation.
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References
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84 Robert Salisbury, Lord, “Count Bismarck's Circular Letters to Foreign Courts, 1870,” The Quarterly Review 129 (October 1870), 553Google Scholar. I am grateful to Marc Trachtenberg for pointing me to this article.
85 Kratochwil and Ruggie argue that our standard methodology is inapproprite for verifying the existence of norms in the latter sense because pointing to instances in which norms are violated does not establish that they do not exist or are not important. See Friedrich Kra-tochwil and Gerard Ruggie, John, “International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State,” International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986), 766Google Scholar–69. A more general treatment of norms along these lines is Kratochwil, Friedrich, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Con ditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1988Google Scholar).
86 This question is raised, among other places, in Alker's analyses of how people play and think about Prisoners' Dilemma in the laboratory. See Hayward Alker, Jr., and Roger Hur-wirtz, “Resolving Prisoner's Dilemmas” (unpub., M.I.T.); Alker, “Reflective Resolutions of Sequential Prisoner's Dilemmas,” presented at the meeting of the Society for General Systems Research, May 30, 1985; and Alker, “From Quantity to Quality: A New Research Program on Resolving Sequential Prisoner's Dilemmas,” presented at the 1985 meeting of the American Political Science Association. The incentives and settings of laboratory situations are so different from those operating in international politics, however, that it is far from clear that these experiments tell us much that can be directly transferred.
87 See the following essays, all by Schroeder: “The Lost Intermediaries: The Impact of 1870 on the European System,” International History Review 6 (February 1984), 1–27; “Containment Nineteenth-Century Style: How Russia Was Restrained,” South Atlantic Quarterly 82 (Winter 1983), 1–18; “World War I as Galloping Gertie,” Journal of Modern History 44 (September 1972), 319–45; “The Nineteenth-Century Balance of Power: Language and Theory,” paper delivered at the 1977 meeting of the American Political Science Association; “The 19th-century International System: Changes in the Structure,” World Politics 39 (October 1986), 1–26. Also see Kratochwil, Friedrich, “On the Notion of 'Interest' in International Relations,” International Organization 36 (Winter 1982), 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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89 Salisbury (fn. 84), 556. During the Eastern Crisis of 1877, William Gladstone asked: “What is to be the consequence to civilisation and humanity, to public order, if British interests are to be the rule for British agents all over the world, and are to be for them the measure of right or wrong?” (Quoted in Seton-Watson, fn. 72, p. 69.) For a related general argument, see Sen, Armatya, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavior Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (Summer 1977), 326Google Scholar–41.
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94 Mackie, John, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977), 119Google Scholar–20; see also Keohane (fn. 58), 126–27, and Keohane, , “Reciprocity in International Relations,” International Organization 40 (Winter 1986), 20–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
95 Marwell, Gerald and Ames, Ruth, “Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else?” Journal of Public Economics 15 (June 1981), 295–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Joanne Gowa for referring me to this instructive article. Also see Nemeth, Charlan, “A Critical Analysis of Research Utilizing the Prisoner's Dilemma Paradigm for the Study of Bargaining,” in Berkowitz, Leonard, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, VI (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 203Google Scholar–34; Kahneman, Daniel, Knetsch, Jack, and Thaler, Richard, “Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics,” Journal of Business 59 (October 1986), S285CrossRefGoogle Scholar–300; Sen (fn. 89). Transcripts of the deliberations during the Cuban missile crisis reveal President Kennedy's concern with perceived fairness: McGeorge Bundy, transcriber, and James Blight, editor, “October 27, 1962: Transcripts of the meetings of the ExComm,” International Security 12 (Winter 1987/88), 30–92.
96 In his presidential address to the Public Choice Society, Dennis Mueller made a similar point: contrary to the logic of PD, in these situations
most of us choose the cooperative strategy most of the time. Why? Because we were taught to do so.... One is almost embarrassed to make these observations were it not that so many of us who work with rational egoist models continually build our models on assumptions that ignore these truisms from psychology and everyday life.
Mueller, “Rational Egoism vs. Adaptive Egoism as a Fundamental Postulate for a Descriptive Theory of Human Behavior,” Public Choice 51 (No. 1, 1986), 5–6.
97 See, for example, Harsany, John, “Bargaining in Ignorance of the Opponent's Utility Function,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 6 (March 1962Google Scholar).
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