Suchergebnisse

Many international interactions are structured like a prisoner's dilemma because there are incentives to cooperate but also incentives to defect. In an infinitely repeated prisoner dilemma interaction, valuing the future highly enough by discounting the future less can ensure cooperation. Another factor that affects international cooperation in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma interaction is how quickly actors can respond to defection with retaliation, in other words, the speed of retaliation. Speeding up retaliation to ensure cooperation is an attractive strategy because it is flexible. It can be adapted to the particular characteristics of a dyad of cooperation and can vary with different actors and even different forms of cooperation between the same two actors. An analysis of an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma interaction shows that if speeding up retaliation is costless, payoffs are constant in time, and the temptation payoff is reduced in proportion to the speed-up of retaliation, then no matter how unfavorable the starting discount factor and unfavorable the payoffs, speeding up retaliation can make cooperation sustainable. This, in combination with its inherent flexibility, makes speeding up retaliation a potentially powerful tool to make cooperation sustainable. Because speeding up retaliation likely has some implementation costs and because prisoner dilemma payoffs may not be constant/even in time, there are limits on when speeding up retaliation is effective. However, the analysis shows that if implementation costs are not too high, payoffs are not too uneven, or, if uneven in a particularly unfavorable way, punishment, when inflicted, is sufficiently punishing, then speeding up retaliation can still be effective in ensuring sustained cooperation.

Wage inequality, including the college/high school education premium, has increased substantially in the United States. A key part of the most widely accepted explanation for this is that skill-biased technological change accelerated during this time. This article suggests that the impact of skill-biased technological change was closer to constant in the second half of the twentieth century. This leaves a large unexplained decrease in the college/high school education premium in the 1940s and a large unexplained increase in the 1980s. The current article provides evidence that the upsurge and decline in union power during those respective periods provide a good explanation for these unexplained wage inequality changes.

Realists argue that relative gains concerns make cooperation more difficult than liberal institutionalists expect. In response, Duncan Snidal has argued that when the number of states increases, the problem of relative gains concerns is generally attenuated. The author contends that current analysis of the impact of increasing the number of states is contingent on two implicit and inaccurate assumptions. Relative gains concerns, rather than being relative "absolute" gains concerns, are relative "percentage" gains concerns, and currently, an increase in the number of states is caused by the breakup of a state. Using these new assumptions, the author shows that when the number of states increases, the negative impact of relative gains concerns can continue under many conditions to inhibit cooperation. The results have specific predictions about changes in the likelihood of cooperation due to state breakup, such as the Soviet Union, and state merging, such as the European Union.