Free riding and coordination difficulties are held to be the primary causes of cooperation breakdown among nonrelatives. These thwarting effects are particularly severe in the absence of effective monitoring institutions capable of sanctioning deviant behavior. Unfortunately, solutions to global...

Recent contributions to the theoretical and experimental literature suggest that minimum participation rules (MPRs) are able to reduce free-riding incentives and may facilitate cooperation (or at least coordination) at the extensive margin of international environmental agreements. Based on a...

We show that U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol is straightforward under political economy considerations. The reason is that U.S. compliance costs exceed low willingness to pay for dealing with global warming in the U.S. The withdrawal had a crucial impact on the concretion of the Protocol...

In international politics, intergovernmental treaties provide the rules of the game. Similar to private law, treaty designers face a trade-off between flexibility to adjust to unforeseen contingencies and the danger that the binding nature of the treaty and hence, the level of commitment by...