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This study introduces a simple nonparametric test for the relative discrimination of models in international relations research. The common parametric approach, the Vuong test, does not perform well under the small-n, high canonical correlation conditions that are sometimes encountered in world politics research. The nonparametric approach outperforms the Vuong test in Monte Carlo experiments and is trivial to implement even for the most complicated models. The method is applied to two empirical examples: the debate over long cycles and the effect of domestic politics on foreign policy decision making.

This volume further explores the possibilities that rational choice and game theory have to offer for international relations research, using a variety of approaches. For instance, while paying due attention to the importance of bilateral representations of international situations in the form of two person games, it also covers cooperative problems in international relations at a multilateral level. In order to achieve this, it contains several pieces of work that are inspired by notions of coalition analysis and cooperative game theory. In order to cover the various aspects of the formal treatment of international cooperation, the volume is divided into five parts: General Aspects, Specific Applications of Game Theory and Cooperation, Deterrence, Escalation and Crises, and finally Other Approaches to Modeling International Cooperation

Actor-level variations in the amounts of uncertainty have been widely ignored in the growing literature on statistical models of strategic interaction in international relations. In this article, I provide a tool for testing theories about the level of uncertainty in strategic interactions. I show that ignoring potential variations in levels of uncertainty across different cases can be a source of bias for empirical analyses. I propose a method to incorporate this form of heteroskedasticity into existing estimators and show that this method can improve inferences. With a series of Monte Carlo experiments, I evaluate the magnitude and the severity of the bias and inconsistency in estimators that ignore heteroskedasticity. More importantly, the tools developed in this article have many interesting substantive application areas. Examples considered include measuring speculators' suboptimal behavior tendencies in international currency crises, and capturing varying levels of signaling and Bayesian updating behavior in the recent strategic models of signaling.

Unknown to most world politics scholars & political scientists in general, traditional methods of model discrimination such as likelihood ratio tests, F-tests, & artificial nesting fail when applied to nonnested models. That the vast majority of models used throughout international relations research have nonlinear functional forms complicates the problem. The purpose of this research is to suggest methods of properly discriminating between nonnested models & then to demonstrate how these techniques can shed light on substantive debates in international relations. Reanalysis of two well-known articles that compare structural realism to various alternatives suggests that the evidence against realism in both articles is overstated. 9 Tables, 4 Figures, 2 Appendixes, 58 References. Adapted from the source document.