Text Book- Chapter 2

Question 1

Cooperation

Answer 1

Cooperation can make the parties acting together better off, making another actor worse off.

Question 2

“Problems of collaboration”

Answer 2

A more serious barrier to cooperation arises if the actors have an individual incentive to defect from cooperation, even though cooperation could make everyone better off. Cooperative interactions in which actors have a unilateral incentive to defect are called problems of collaboration.

Question 3

Why not agree to stop building when the United States had 2,300 warheads and the Soviet Union had 4,200?

Answer 3

That would have kept the same ratio of forces but at much lower cost. Both states might have been better off with such an agreement. The problem, however, is that each state had an incentive to cheat on such a deal in order to attain superiority over the other. If one stopped building, the other would be tempted to keep going. Therefore, each feared that its own restraint in building weapons would be exploited, leaving it vulnerable.
The best strategy for each state was to go on amassing weapons. This left both countries worse off than if they could have cooperated to limit their arms competition.

Question 4

Verifying Compliance

Answer 4

In addition to standards against which actors can judge compliance, institutions often provide ways to acquire information on compliance. President Ronald Reagan famously said about arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, “ trust, but verify”— a rough translation of an old Russian proverb.

Question 5

Actors comply with institutions for two reasons.

Answer 5

1. since many problems in international relations combine both cooperation and bargaining, actors may agree to comply with rules for the cooperation they facilitate even though the outcome of those rules is biased against them.
   In these situations, the value of the cooperation created by the institution outweighs the costs of a relatively disadvantageous bargain.
2. actors comply with institutions because they are already in place and cheaper to use, even if they are biased, than are the costs of creating a brand- new institution that might more fully refl ect their interests.