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⁴ I thank an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point.

⁵ Downs, George W., “Enforcement and the Evolution of Cooperation,” Michigan Journal of International Law 19 (Spring 1998)Google Scholar.

⁶ Downs, Rockc, and Barsoom (fn. 3) demonstrate that the expectation that punishment may follow any dramatic defection played an important role in complying with some U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements, despite the lack of formal enforcement provisions in these treaties. Elsewhere this author explores the role of domestic enforcement in some regimes where enforcement provisions are formally lacking. See Dai, Xinyuan, “Compliance without Carrots or Sticks: How International Institutions Influence National Policies” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁷ Mitchell, Ronald B., “Regime Design Matters: Intentional Oil Pollution and Treaty Compliance,” International Organization 48 (Summer 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chayes, Abram and Chayes, Antonia Handler, The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁸ Although monitoring and enforcement are closely related analytically, they are nevertheless distinct; similarly, who is in die position to collect information and who can actually use the information to enforce behavioral change are two different issues.

⁹ George Downs highlights the prescriptive nature in the study of environmental regimes. See Downs, , “Constructing Effective Environmental Regimes,” Annual Review of Political Science 3 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Throughout the article, I ask how varying incentive structures give rise to observed monitoring arrangements. But I do not claim or imply that what we observe empirically are the most effective monitoring arrangements in terms of discovering all incidences of noncompliance.

¹¹ To take advantage of low-cost monitors, states need not formally institutionalize these decentralized monitors. Neither is it necessary for these nonstate monitors to cease the pursuit of their selfinterest or independence. The relationship between nonstate monitors and treaty organizations varies, which I will discuss in more detail later with empirical examples.

¹² Keohane (fn. 1). See also Keohane, Robert O., “The Demand for International Regimes,” in Krasner, Stephen D., ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

¹³ Snidal, , “Coordination versus Prisoner's Dilemma: Implications for International Cooperation and Regimes,” American Political Science Review 79 (December 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Arthur A. Stein, “Coordination and Collaboration: Regimes in an Anarchic World,” in Krasner (fn. 12); Martin, Lisa L., “The Rational State Choice of Multilateralism,” in Ruggie, John Gerard, ed., Multilateralism Matters (New YorkColumbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Morrow, James D., “Modeling the Forms of International Cooperation: Distribution versus Information,” International Organization 48 (Summer 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Downs, Rocke, and Barsoom (fn. 3). For broader functions of international organizations, see Abbott, Kenneth W. and Snidal, Duncan, “Why States Act through Formal International Organizations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42 (February 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Fearon, , “Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation,” International Organization 52 (Spring 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Ronald Mitchell addresses transparency, a related but more general question; see Mitchell, , “Sources of Transparency: Information Systems in International Regimes,” International Studies Quarterly 42 (March 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal address variations in institutional features such as membership, scope, and flexibility, but not monitoring arrangements; see Koremenos, , Lipson, , and Snidal, , “The Rational Design of International Institutions,” International Organization 55 (Autumn 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Kreps, David M., A Course in Microeconomic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; see also Holmström, Bengt, “Moral Hazard and Observability,” Bell Journal of Economics 10 (Spring 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ McCubbins, and Schwartz, , “Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms,” American Journal of Political Science 29 (February 1984)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Arthur Lupia and Mathew McCubbins address a credibility problem of fire alarms and explore ways in which Congress can influence the amount of useful information available in the course of legislating administrative arrangements. See Lupia, and McCubbins, , “Designing Bureaucratic Accountability,” Law and Contemporary Problems 57 (Winter—Spring 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Learning from Oversight: Fire Alarms and Police Patrols Reconstructed,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 10 (April 1994)Google Scholar. For a larger framework of how people in general get informed by third parties, see Lupia, Arthur and McCubbins, Mathew D., The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Knew (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Arguably, although verification is important, even being suspected of committing violations can often cause much damage and thus may have some deterrent effect.

¹⁹ McCubbins, Mathew D., Noll, Roger G., and Weingast, Barry R., “Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 3 (Fall 1987)Google Scholar; idem, “Structure and Process, Politics and Policy: Administrative Arrangements and the Political Control of Agencies,” Virginia Law Review 75, no. 2 (1989)Google Scholar. Still debatable, however, is the extent to which administrative procedures control agencies and to which Congress indeed stacks the deck. As Kathleen Bawn argues, Congress's use of administrative procedures depends on technical uncertainty about the policy consequences and uncertainty about the political environment; see Bawn, , “Political Control versus Expertise: Congressional Choices about Administrative Procedures,” American Political Science Review 89 (March 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ As McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast (fn. 19) argue, Congress's ability to apply sanctions is limited. Elsewhere, Dai (fn. 6) identifies the domestic constituency mechanism as an alternative to the logic o f carrots and sticks in interstate politics.

²¹ See Milgrom, Paul R., North, Douglas C., and Weingast, Barry R., “The Role of Institutions in the Revival o f Trade: The Medieval Law Merchant, Private Judges, and the Champagne Fairs,” Economics and Politics 2 (March 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cahrert, Randall L., “Rational Actors, Equilibrium, and Social Institutions,” in Knight, Jack and Sened, Itai, eds., Explaining Social Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Greif, Avner, Milgrom, Paul, and Weingast, Barry R., “Coordination, Commitment, and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild,” Journal of Political Economy 102 (August 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study of organizational forms of trade liberalization, see Yarbrough, Beth V. and Yarbrough, Robert M., Cooperation and Governance in International Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Milgrom, North, and Weingast (fn. 21).

²³ For information provision by institutions at various aggregate levels, see Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKean, Margaret A, “Success on the Commons: A Comparative Examination of Institutions for Common Property Resource Management,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 4 (July 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haas, Peter, Keohane, Robert O., and Levy, Marc, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Ostrom, Elinor and Keohane, Robert O., “Introduction,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 6 (October 1994)Google Scholar. For a cautious view on transferring propositions across levels of analysis, see Young, Oran, “The Problem of Scale in Human/Environment Relationships,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 6 (October 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ It is important to note that the interest alignment in my theory is between noncompliance victims and their own states. A different kind of alignment—cross-country interest alignment—is possible where, for instance, state A has incentives to protect human rights victims in country X. But that is not how the interest alignment in this article is defined. Empirically, such interests of states are often derivatives of other more fundamental interests.

²⁵ Note that the cost is defined as the extra effort by noncompliance victims in discovering whether they are being victimized and who is injuring them. A low-cost monitor is such because he may directly experience noncompliance, not because his monitoring does not cost states anything. Therefore, one cannot infer from my definition of low-cost monitors that NGOs are generally low-cost monitors amply because, from the perspective of states, their monitoring costs nothing.

²⁶ Throughout this article, centralization refers to the degree to which monitoring tasks are carried out by treaty organizations.

²⁷ This is consistent with some lessens from the bureaucratic agency literature: while noncompliance is often detected by fire alarms, communication of this information is often assisted by police patrol.

²⁸ One problem that victims may face is that of collective action. By speaking out against human rights abuses, for instance, one may attract even more abuse. Thus, there may be free-riding incentives among potential victims. I will address collective action problems in the next section.

²⁹ For the notion of privileged group, see Olson, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar. For a refined version of it, see Hardin, Russell, Collective Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Applications of this notion in international relations are many. For a classic example, see Olson, Mancur and Zechhauser, Richard, “An Economic Theory of Alliances,” Review of Economics and Statistics 48 (August 1966)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Hardin (fn. 29)>52.

³¹ For a discussion of asymmetry in the contents of goods, see Hardin (m. 29).

³² For the way in which carefully drawn tariffs may easily benefit cooperative firms more than free riders, see Stigler, George J., “Free Riders and Collective Action: An Appendix to Theories of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 5 (Autumn 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³⁶ Domestic actors who support compliance occasionally exist; the IMF, for instance, would seek out such actors in trying to influence debtor governments to reduce military spending. However, civilians interested in reducing military expenditures and the bureaucratic section competing for power against the military do not usually have the information on military spending. Rather they need the data that the IMF gets. See Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7).

³⁷ South Africa essentially managed to keep its twenty years o f nuclear activity—leading to the bomb and eventually to nuclear dismantlement—out of the public eye. See Reiss, Mitchell, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Cemer Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

³⁸ International Atomic Energy Agency, Information Circular (INFCIRC) 153 (Vienna, 1971)Google Scholar.

³⁹ The level of interest alignment between noncompliance victims and their states is naturally not as high in cases where victims are subnational actors as in cases where victims are states themselves. Indeed, interests between a specific group of producers and those of their government are not always aligned. This, as I mentioned in the theory section, relates to whether the government's protection of such a group conflicts with other more important subnational interests, either other business sectors or more generally the consumers. In practice, however, states often represent producers' interests more than they do consumers' interests. I will discuss the complications with interest alignment in more detail later in this section.

⁴⁰ Mavroidis, Petros C., “Surveillance Schemes: The GAIT'S New Trade Policy Review Mechanism,” Michigan Journal of International Law 13 (Winter 1992)Google Scholar.

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⁴³ For documentation of this phenomenon in the GATT/WTO, see Christina R. Sevilla, “Complaints and Compliance: The Politics of Enforcing GATT/WTO Rules” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 29-September 1, 1996).

⁴⁴ It is possible that some states may have incentives to protect human rights victims in another country. Thus, two kinds of monitoring arrangements involving states may be possible. One possibility is monitoring by treaty organizations. A major hurdle here is that, for each state, voting for a treaty organization to monitor human rights policies in other countries is at the same time voting for the same treaty organization to check on one's own human rights practice. To the extent that states may care about the former less than they want to avoid the latter, the amount of authority and resources that states are willing to delegate to such treaty organizations may be limited. The other possibility is monitoring by some states of human rights practices in other states. The United States, for instance, unilaterally does annual human rights reports on nations. This, however, does not seem representative among countries. It is also interesting to note that, even in the case where the U.S. monitors human rights policies of other states, it is usually those potential victims in these countries and NGOs who represent the interests of these potential victims—inside those countries or outside—who first detect noncompliance and bring it to light.

⁴⁵ Even for the two principal treaties, the reporting record is not fully satisfactory. While 59 of 113 parties were up to date with reporting obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 46 of 116 parties were up to date under the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. See UN Secretary-General, Status of International Human Rights Instruments and the General Situation of Overdue Reports, UN Doc. HRI/MC/1992/3 (September 25, 1992)Google Scholar; Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 161.

⁴⁶ Over 80 percent of reports due have been turned in every year of the ILO's existence, except during World War II. See Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 157.

⁴⁷ Kooijmans, Pieter Hendrik, The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (Leiden: Stichting Nscm-Boekerij, 1990), 16–17Google Scholar.

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⁴⁹ Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights Regimes (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 344–46Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 254.

⁵¹ Katfaiyn Sikkink has demonstrated the importance of information networks among human rights NGOs. For instance, human rights violations in Mexico evaded international scrutiny for a long time, until NGOs both inside and outside began to document human rights abuses and together bring them to the international attention. See Sikkink, Kathryn A., “Human Rights, Principled Issue- Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America,” International Organization 47 (Summer 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Nongovernmental Organizations, Democracy, and Human Rights in Latin America,” in Farer, Tom J., ed., Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in tie Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Denise Dresser, “Treading Lightly and without a Stick: International Actors and die Promotion of Democracy in Mexico,” in Farer.

⁵² George Downs, David Rocke, and Peter Barsoom make the point that the European regime is among those deep institutions; see Downs, , Rocke, , and Barsoom, , “Managing the Evolution o f Multilateralism,” International Organization 52 (Spring 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Heffeman, Liz, “A Comparative View of Individual Petition Procedures under the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 19 (February 1997), 87–88Google Scholar. Arguably, one way that the strength of the European regime is translated into the effectiveness of the monitoring arrangements is via the institutionalized procedure of individual petition, which systematically utilizes and facilitates the information flow from low-cost monitors to treaty regimes. The European regime lends substantial support to the prediction of my theory: even in a resourceful regime such as the European human rights regime, it is the human rights victims who detect noncompliance and, with the enabling assistance of the treaty organization, bring that information to light. This point benefited from the comments of an anonymous reviewer.

⁵⁴ Only three out o f nine environmental regimes surveyed by Jesse Ausubel and David Victor require formal reporting. See Ausubel, and Victor, , “Verification of International Environmental Agreements,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 17 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵⁶ Ausubel and Victor (fn. 54), 20.

⁵⁷ Greene, Owen, 'Ozone Depletion: Implementing and Strengthening the Montreal Protocol,” in Poole, John B. and Guthrie, Richard, eds., Verification Report 1992: Yearbook on Arms Control and Environmental Agreements (London: VERTIC, 1992).Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Mitchell, Ronald B., Intentional Oil Pollution at Sea: Environmental Policy and Treaty Compliance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 134Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Sand, Peter, “Regional Approaches to Transboundary Air Pollution,” in Helm, John, ed., Energy: Production, Consumption, and Consequences (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990), 259Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Marc Levy, “European Acid Rain: The Power of Tote-Board Diplomacy,” in Haas, Keohane, and Levy (m. 23).

⁶¹ For example, in 1994 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) had an annual budget of nearly 57 million Swiss francs and a staff of more than five hundred. For another example, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is financially supported by over five million contributors. See Lanchbery, John, “Long-Term Trends in Systems for Implementation Review in International Agreements on Fauna and Flora,” in Victor, David G., Raustiala, Kal, and Skolnikoff, Eugene B., eds., The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: MT Press, 1998), 65–66Google Scholar.

⁶² Owen Greene, “The System for Implementation Review in the Ozone Regime,” in Victor, Raustiala, and Skolnikoff (fn. 61), 183–84.

⁶³ Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 164–65.

⁶⁴ Raustiala, Kal, “The 'Participatory Revolution' in International Environmental Law,” Harvard Environmental Law Review 21 (Summer 1997), 561Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Mitchell (fn. 15).

⁶⁶ Sachariew, Kamen, “Promoting Compliance with International Environmental Legal Standards: Reflections on Monitoring and Reporting Mechanisms,” in Handl, Gunther, ed., Yearbook of International Environmental Law (London: Graham and Trotman, 1991), 34Google Scholar.

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⁷⁰ Chayes and Chayes (fn. 7), 267.