Using the infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma game as a modeling platform, we examine how domestic political institutions affect the ability of nations to trust and cooperate with each other. We propose a strategy, the agent-specific grim trigger, in which national leaders direct punishments...

In the context of a noisy, continuous-choice prisoner's dilemma, the authors examine how leadership turnover and domestic institutions affect the depth and reliability of cooperative agreement that can be enforced between states through the use of leader-specific punishment strategies. If...

A theory of sanction duration that focuses on differences between democratic and nondemocratic states in the structure of leaders’ support coalitions is tested, using a hazard model to analyze a data set of 47 sanction events with 272 observations. Results show that leadership change...