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Realism, Game Theory, and Cooperation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Robert Jervis
Robert Jervis
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

Recent work has focused on the problem of how states cooperate in the environment of anarchy. Linked to the ideas of the Prisoners' Dilemma and public goods, that work has provided important insights and lines of research. But it also has problems and limitations, which are explored in the paper. The anarchy approach stresses individual actors' choices and slights questions of how issues are posed and constrained. It takes preferences as given without exploring either the frequency of PD situations or the ways in which preferences are formed and can change. Many of the concepts the framework uses—e.g., cooperation and defection, the distinction between offense and defense, and the nature of power—are problematical. Issues of beliefs, perceptions, norms, and values also lead to a different perspective on cooperation.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , April 1988 , pp. 317 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1988

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References

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18 This is true for Jervis (fn. 1).

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20 Jervis (fn. 14), 84–113. Similarly, many of the arguments about whether the failure of detente was inevitable or a matter of errors can be phrased in terms of whether the relaxation of tensions was Pareto-supenor to a high level of competition.

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27 See Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire, forthcoming.

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29 Van Evera (fn. 28); Evera, Van, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security 9 (Summer 1984), 58–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984,” ibid., 108–46; Snyder, , The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984Google Scholar). For a rebuttal, see Sagan, Scott, “1914 Revisited: Allies, Offense, and Instability,” International Security 11 (Fall 1986), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar–76, and the exchange of letters between Snyder and Sagan, ibid., 11 (Winter 1986/87), 187–98.

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33 Seaborg, Glenn, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 120Google Scholar.

34 Of course, each state wants to limit the other's power and influence and will therefore try to see that any actor the adversary is supporting does not win; but from this we cannot deduce preferences for specified countries or factions to prevail.

35 Greenhouse, Linda, “U.S. Assailed Again on Curbing Cuban Immigrants,” New York Times, September 27, 1986Google Scholar.

36 Maresia, John, “Helsinki,” in George, Alexander, Farley, Philip, and Dallin, Alexander, eds., U.S.-Soviet Security Cooperation: Achievements, Failures, Lessons (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 1988Google Scholar). Also see Garthoff, Raymond, Detente and Confrontation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985), 480Google Scholar. For an argument that people's preferences are often formed by their behavior, see Bern, Daryl, “Self-Perception Theory,” in Berkowitz, Leonard, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, VI (New York: Academic Press, 1972Google Scholar); for an application to international politics, see Larson, Deborah, The Origins of Containment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985Google Scholar).

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38 See Follett, Mary Parker, Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parser Follett, Metcalf, H. C. and Urwick, L., eds. (New York: Harper & Row, 1942Google Scholar); Walton, Richard and McKersie, Richard, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 126Google Scholar–83; Haas, Ernst, Beyond the Nation-State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 86–125Google Scholar.

39 For a discussion of the ways in which changes in technology influenced American attitudes toward antisatellite weapons, particularly by providing satellites with offensive as well as defensive military capabilities, see Stares, Paul, The Militarization of Space (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985Google Scholar), and Weber, Steve and Drell, Sydney, “Cooperation and Discord in the Militarization of Space: U.S. Strategy, 1960–1985,”Google Scholar in George, Farley, and Dallin (fn. 36).

40 Thus it is not surprising that quantitative studies find that conflict and cooperation are not always inversely related to each other.

41 Conybeare (fn. 26).

42 Markham, James, “Allied Diplomats Defy East German Controls,” New York Times, May 28, 1986Google Scholar. For parallel discussion of an important case in the late 18th century, see Schroeder, Paul, “Old Wine in New Bottles: Recent Contributions to British Foreign Policy and European International Politics, 1789–1848,” journal of British Studies 26 (January 1987), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 See Garthoff (fn. 36), 38–50, 1069. The Japanese had a similar conception of cooperation with the British in China in the 1930s: see Haggie, Paul, Britannia at Bay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 126Google Scholar.

44 See Jervis (fn. 1), at 186–214; Quester, George, Offense and Defense in the International sytem (New York: Wiley, 1977Google Scholar); Levy, Jack, “The Offensive/Defensive Balance of Military Technology: A Theoretical and Historical Analysis,” International Studies Quarterly 28 (June 1984), 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar–38; Van Evera (fns. 28 and 29); Snyder (fn. 29); Posen, Barry, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984Google Scholar); Weber and Drell (fn. 39).

45 See the literature cited in fn. 29 above.

46 Downs, Rocke, and Siverson (fn. 19).

47 For one effort at doing so, see Robert [ervis, “From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation,” World Politics 38 (October 1985), 58–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 62–64. For a further discussion, see Jervis, “Cooperation Under Anarchy: Problems and Limitations,” in Alker and Ashley (fn. 1).

48 Arnold Wolfers, “The Balance of Power in Theory and Practice,” in Wolfers (fn. 21), 122–24; Waltz (fn. 24), 125–28; Stephen M. Walt, “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power,” International Security 9 (Spring 1985), 3–43, and The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987Google Scholar); Snyder, Jack and Jervis, Robert, eds., Strategic Beliefs and Superpower Competition in the Asian RimlandGoogle Scholar, forthcoming.

49 Nuclear weapons may have changed this, as is indicated by the title and essays in Brodie, Bernard et al., The Absolute Weapon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946Google Scholar).

50 The implications of the fact that states often seek relative rather than absolute gains have been discussed by Stein, Arthur, “The Hegemon's Dilemma,” International Organization 38 (Spring 1984), 355CrossRefGoogle Scholar–86. Also see Gowa, Joanne, “Anarchy, Egoism, and Third Images: The Evolution of Cooperation and International Relations,” International Organization 40 (Winter 1986), 176CrossRefGoogle Scholar–77, and Joseph Grieco, “Distributional Uncertainty and the Realist Problem of International Cooperation,” paper presented to the 1986 APSA meeting. For a discussion of the issues and a summary of the experimental literature, see Deborah Larson, “Game Theory and the Psychology of Reciprocity” (unpub., Columbia University), 25–31. More generally, Fred Hirsch, in Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976Google Scholar), brilliantly demonstrates that many goods in society are “positional”—that is, they are inherently competitive. Only a few people can be at the top of an established hierarchy of power or prestige. Certain goods—such as living in an uncrowded area—cannot be shared with large numbers of others. More fundamentally, in many aspects of life we judge how well we are doing by comparing ourselves to others.

51 Axelrod (fn. i).

52 See the discussion of strategies in Axelrod's computer tournament in Behr, Roy, “Nice Guys Finish Last—Sometimes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 25 (June 1981), 289–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 The relevant literature from experimental psychology is summarized in Larson (fn. 50), 28–29.

54 See Tucker, Robert W., The Inequality of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1977Google Scholar); Krasner, Stephen, Structural Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985Google Scholar).

55 Stein (fn. 50).

56 Friedberg, , The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 1988Google Scholar), chap. 2.

57 Waltz (fn. 24); see also Waltz, “Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics,” in Keohane, Robert O., ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 334Google Scholar.

58 Keohane, , After Hegemony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 110Google Scholar–32.

59 For further discussion of the inference processes and evidence of their importance drawn from experiments and case studies, see Jervis (fn. 14), 32–48, and Larson (fn. 50).

60 Yergin, Daniel, “‘Scoop’ Jackson Goes for Broke,” Atlantic Monthly 233 (June 1974), 81Google Scholar. (The same error is made, even more crudely, by Secretary of Defense Weinberger in Annual Report to the Congress, FY 1988 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987], 16Google Scholar.) Acheson's views are presented in Spanier, John, The Truman-MacArthur Controversy and the Korean War (New York: Norton, 1965), 97Google Scholar. Similar examples are discussed in Jervis (fn. 14), 67–76, and Seaborg (fn. 12), 30–31.

61 Garthoff (fn. 36). Also see Van Evera's discussion (fn. 28) of the role of nationalism in preventing statesmen from objectively gauging the behavior of their own states.

62 See the classic essay by Holsti, Ole, “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy: Dulles and Russia,” in Finlay, David, Holsti, Ole, and Fagen, Richard, Enemies in Politics (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), 25–96Google Scholar. Sullivan, Michael, International Relations: Theories and Evidence (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 45–46Google Scholar, questions the links between Dulles's beliefs and American behavior, however.

63 Gromyko is quoted in Golan, Galia, Yom Kippur and After (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 68Google Scholar. The treatment of the 1973 war is a good litmus test for one's views on detente: compare, for example, the discussions in Gelman, Harry, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984Google Scholar), chap. 4; Garthoff (fn. 36), chap. 11; and George, Alexander, Managing U.S.-Soviet Rivalry (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983Google Scholar), chap. 7.

64 For experimental support for this proposition, see Ross, Michael and Sicoly, Fiore, “Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (March 1979), 322CrossRefGoogle Scholar–36.

65 Bullen, Roger, Palmerston, Guizot, and the Collapse of the Entente Cordial (London: Ath-lone, 1974), 81Google Scholar, 93.

66 Axelrod (fn. 1), 182–83.

67 Downs, Rocke, and Siverson (fn. 19), 133–34. Also see Bendor, Jonathan, “In Good Times and Bad: Reciprocity in an Uncertain World,” American Journal of Political Science 31 (August 1987), 531CrossRefGoogle Scholar–58. Downs, and Rocke, discuss the implications of this finding in “Tacit Bargaining and Arms Control,” World Politics 39 (April 1987), 297–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Larson, Deborah, “Crisis Prevention and the Austrian State Treaty,” International Organization 41 (Winter 1987), 30–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Stein, Janice, “Calculation, Miscalculation, and Conventional Deterrence II: The View from Jerusalem,” in Jervis, Robert, Ned Lebow, Richard, and Stein, Janice, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 60–88Google Scholar. This is part of the broader difficulty statesmen face in deciding whether the other side is an aggressor who must be met with firmness (if not force), or a more reasonable state that can be conciliated or, to use the older term, appeased. See Jervis (fn. 14), chap. 3.

70 Ibid., 109–13; Richard Ned Lebow, “The Deterrence Deadlock: Is there a Way Out?” in fervis, Lebow, and Stein (fn. 69), 180–202.

71 See Haas, Ernst, “Why Collaborate? Issue-Linkage and International Regimes,” World Politics 32 (April 1980), 357–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robert Rothstein (fn. 37); Jervis, Robert, “Security Regimes,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), 359CrossRefGoogle Scholar–60, 373–75; Jack Snyder, “Perceptions of the Security Dilemma in 1941,” in Jervis, Lebow, and Stein (fn. 69).

72 See, for example, Rich, Norman, Why the Crimean War? (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985Google Scholar), and Seton-Watson, R. W., Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question (New York: Norton, 1972Google Scholar).

73 Snyder (fn. 29); Posen (fn. 44).

74 For a further discussion, see Jervis, Robert, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 126Google Scholar–29; Jervis, , “Psychological Aspects of Crisis Stability,” in Jervis, , The Implications of the Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming); Ned Lebow, Richard, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987Google Scholar); Carter, Ashton, Steinbruner, John, and Zraket, Charles, Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987Google Scholar).

75 Deutsch, Morton, “Trust and Suspicion,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (December 1958), 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar–79; Deutsch, “The Effect of Motivational Orientation upon Trust and Suspicion,” Human Relations 13 (May i960), 123–39. Similarly, rational choice analyses of politicians' behavior would yield very different results if it were assumed that the value being maximized was the individual's economic prospects rather than his power or votes. We would then expect politicians to cater to popular or constituency interests only to amass enough power that could be efficiently traded upon for pecuniary gain.

76 Some observers have attributed the relative lack of concern in the home country for the German hostages taken in Beirut in January 1987 to the weak German national identity. See James Markham, “West Germans Low-Key About Abductions,” New York Times, January 19, 1987. Compare the reaction of Japan, a country some describe as “a huge tribal society,” in a similar situation: Clyde Haberman, “Japan Outraged at Manila Abduction of Executive,” New York Times, February 15, 1987.

77 This question is an ancient one and can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle's advice that Alexander distinguish among his subjects according to whether they were Greeks or non-Greeks rather than according to their personal, individual characteristics; see The Politics of Aristotle, ed. and trans, by Barker, Ernest (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 388Google Scholar. For an attempt to use sociobiology to explain national loyalty, see Shaw, R. Paul and Wong, Yuwa, “Ethnic Mobilization and the Seeds of Warfare: An Evolutionary Perspective,” International Studies Quarterly 31 (March 1987), 21–26Google Scholar.

78 Rokeach, Milton and Mezei, Louis, “Race and Shared Belief in Social Choice,” Science 151 (January 1966), 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar–72; Rokeach, , Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1968Google Scholar). Similarly, in the view of the Ottomans, “the community of true believers,... not the state, constitutes the basic Muslim policy, transcending all boundaries.” See Naff, Thomas, “The Ottoman Empire and the European States System,” in Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam, eds., The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 143Google Scholar.

79 Alker, Hayward Jr, and Sherman, Frank, “Collective Security-Seeking Practices Since 1945,” in Frei, Daniel, ed., Managing International Crises (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982), 141Google Scholar–44. This essay draws on the work of Deutsch, Karl, esp. Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957Google Scholar).

80 Fox, William T.R., A Continent Apart: The United States and Canada in World Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985Google Scholar).

81 For a discussion of the role of ideology in alliances, see Holsti, Ole, Hopmann, P. Terrence, and Sullivan, John, Unity and Disintegration in International Alliances (New York: Wiley, 1973Google Scholar), and Walt (fn. 48), 18–26.

82 Deutsch (fn. 79), 46.

83 For discussions of this argument, see Jervis, Robert, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 244Google Scholar–50; Quester, George, American Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1982Google Scholar).

84 Robert Salisbury, Lord, “Count Bismarck's Circular Letters to Foreign Courts, 1870,” The Quarterly Review 129 (October 1870), 553Google Scholar. I am grateful to Marc Trachtenberg for pointing me to this article.

85 Kratochwil and Ruggie argue that our standard methodology is inapproprite for verifying the existence of norms in the latter sense because pointing to instances in which norms are violated does not establish that they do not exist or are not important. See Friedrich Kra-tochwil and Gerard Ruggie, John, “International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State,” International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986), 766Google Scholar–69. A more general treatment of norms along these lines is Kratochwil, Friedrich, Rules, Norms, and Decisions: On the Con ditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 1988Google Scholar).

86 This question is raised, among other places, in Alker's analyses of how people play and think about Prisoners' Dilemma in the laboratory. See Hayward Alker, Jr., and Roger Hur-wirtz, “Resolving Prisoner's Dilemmas” (unpub., M.I.T.); Alker, “Reflective Resolutions of Sequential Prisoner's Dilemmas,” presented at the meeting of the Society for General Systems Research, May 30, 1985; and Alker, “From Quantity to Quality: A New Research Program on Resolving Sequential Prisoner's Dilemmas,” presented at the 1985 meeting of the American Political Science Association. The incentives and settings of laboratory situations are so different from those operating in international politics, however, that it is far from clear that these experiments tell us much that can be directly transferred.

87 See the following essays, all by Schroeder: “The Lost Intermediaries: The Impact of 1870 on the European System,” International History Review 6 (February 1984), 1–27; “Containment Nineteenth-Century Style: How Russia Was Restrained,” South Atlantic Quarterly 82 (Winter 1983), 1–18; “World War I as Galloping Gertie,” Journal of Modern History 44 (September 1972), 319–45; “The Nineteenth-Century Balance of Power: Language and Theory,” paper delivered at the 1977 meeting of the American Political Science Association; “The 19th-century International System: Changes in the Structure,” World Politics 39 (October 1986), 1–26. Also see Kratochwil, Friedrich, “On the Notion of 'Interest' in International Relations,” International Organization 36 (Winter 1982), 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Schroeder, Paul, “Romania and the Great Powers before 1914,” Revue Roumaine D'Histoire 14 (No. 1, 1975), 52–53Google Scholar. As Schroeder puts it in “World War I as Galloping Gertie”: “Everyone wanted a payoff; no one wanted to pay” (fn. 87), 345.

89 Salisbury (fn. 84), 556. During the Eastern Crisis of 1877, William Gladstone asked: “What is to be the consequence to civilisation and humanity, to public order, if British interests are to be the rule for British agents all over the world, and are to be for them the measure of right or wrong?” (Quoted in Seton-Watson, fn. 72, p. 69.) For a related general argument, see Sen, Armatya, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavior Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (Summer 1977), 326Google Scholar–41.

90 Axelrod, Robert, “Modeling the Evolution of Norms,” American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986), 1095–1111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Staub, Ervin, Positive Social Behavior and Morality, I (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 3Google Scholar.

92 Trivers, , “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Journal of Biology 46 (March 1971), 50–51Google Scholar. On p. 52, Trivers anticipates Axelrod's arguments about metanorms. A similar argument about deterrence is made by Dean Pruitt, “Some Relationships Between Interpersonal and International Conflict,” in Axelrod et al. (fn. 3).

93 Gouldner, Alvin, “The Norm of Reciprocity,” American Sociological Review 25 (April 1960), 169Google Scholar–71 (emphasis added); also see Larson (fn. 50), 20–22. For a nice summary of the normative hold of reciprocity, see Robert Cialdini, Influence (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1985), 20–34, and especially the marvelous story on page 27. Staub notes that experiments indicate “that willingness to ask for help is reduced when people do not expect to have an opportunity to provide help in return” (fn. 91, p. 346). The reverse should have been found if rational calculation were the driving force. Also see Charles Kindleberger's review of After Hegemony, “Hierarchy vs. Inertial Cooperation,” International Organization 40 (Autumn 1986), 844–46.

94 Mackie, John, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1977), 119Google Scholar–20; see also Keohane (fn. 58), 126–27, and Keohane, , “Reciprocity in International Relations,” International Organization 40 (Winter 1986), 20–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Marwell, Gerald and Ames, Ruth, “Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else?” Journal of Public Economics 15 (June 1981), 295–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Joanne Gowa for referring me to this instructive article. Also see Nemeth, Charlan, “A Critical Analysis of Research Utilizing the Prisoner's Dilemma Paradigm for the Study of Bargaining,” in Berkowitz, Leonard, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, VI (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 203Google Scholar–34; Kahneman, Daniel, Knetsch, Jack, and Thaler, Richard, “Fairness and the Assumptions of Economics,” Journal of Business 59 (October 1986), S285CrossRefGoogle Scholar–300; Sen (fn. 89). Transcripts of the deliberations during the Cuban missile crisis reveal President Kennedy's concern with perceived fairness: McGeorge Bundy, transcriber, and James Blight, editor, “October 27, 1962: Transcripts of the meetings of the ExComm,” International Security 12 (Winter 1987/88), 30–92.

96 In his presidential address to the Public Choice Society, Dennis Mueller made a similar point: contrary to the logic of PD, in these situations

most of us choose the cooperative strategy most of the time. Why? Because we were taught to do so.... One is almost embarrassed to make these observations were it not that so many of us who work with rational egoist models continually build our models on assumptions that ignore these truisms from psychology and everyday life.

Mueller, “Rational Egoism vs. Adaptive Egoism as a Fundamental Postulate for a Descriptive Theory of Human Behavior,” Public Choice 51 (No. 1, 1986), 5–6.

97 See, for example, Harsany, John, “Bargaining in Ignorance of the Opponent's Utility Function,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 6 (March 1962Google Scholar).