Global governance complexes offer member states opportunities for “regime shifting”: playing off an institutional forum against another with the goal of improving one’s relative bargaining position. I probe the internal validity of this strategy. The model makes two contributions to the governance complex literature. Formally, first, the analysis goes beyond current “outside-option” models of regime shifting, involving a permanent break of negotiations, to “inside-option” models, involving temporary disagreements. Substantively, second, the article models two scenarios of regime shifting, one that works for the weak and another that works for the powerful, and then “tests” the claim held by some in the literature that powerful countries are more likely to avail themselves of the possibility of regime shifting than weaker countries. I conclude that regime shifting is more likely to work for the weak than for the strong.
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Other terms for reconciliation are “integration” (Gehring and Faude 2014) and “brokering” (Hofmann 2009).
See Voeten (2001) for an early statement.
I am referring to the Declaration on the TRIPS agreement and public health adopted on 14 November 2001.
For a rational-choice take on this topic, see Goldsmith and Posner (1999).
Another fitting example is the cycle of peace and wars that charaterize relations among established mafia families.
I am not arguing that rival organizations never co-exist. It is just that I am only interested in those with scale economies that are large enough to make co-existence inefficient.
I chose \(\frac {1}{2}\) for the intercept rather than an algebraic symbol on which to perform comparative statics because it is redundant with the slope component β : one can make it harder for South to offfer a rival succession either by lowering the intercept or by steepening the slope.
The Technical Appendix is available on the Review of International Organizations’ webpage.
This is a defining assumption of non-cooperative game theory.
For an explanation of the meaning of supescript # in “regime shifting#”, see Technical Appendix.
A δ of 1 would take us back to informal institutions, characterized by non-binding rules (Abbott et al. 2000).
Formally speaking, reneging on the part of North would fall off the equilibrium path. This is why I omitted this branch from the tree.
The historical reality behing this crude asymmetry was two decades of UNCTAD resolutions and developing nations’ practices that degraded the Paris and Berne regime to the point that intellectual property was not respected anymore.
Adding new trade negotiations would change nothing to the conclusions.
This country, surprisingly, is the largest southern country, indexed k + 1, because its large size makes its joining of the WTO tip the WTO payoff farthest away from the GATT payoff, slightly reducing the size of the needed incentive.
Recall that I skipped this feature in the prior game by arbitrarily assuming that South were appropriating the entire pie generated by the new organization.
I am thankful to Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni for bringing the wine and other commodity cases to my attention.
Which translates as “single vineyard”, characterized by its soil and climatic idiosyncrasies.
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I wish to thank Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and OliverWesterwinter for organizing and hosting the two Institutional Complexity in Global Governance workshops held at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI (28-30 May 2019, December 16-17, 2019), as well as Benjamin Faude, Jean Pisany-Ferry and the other participants for their useful comments. I wish to thank Brendan Cooley and the other members of the FMIR conference, Vanderbilt University (February 21-22, 2020), for their comments. I am also thankful to Alan van Beek who provided helpful comments on an early version and to the three anonymous reviewers who helped finalize the manuscript.
Author information Authors and AffiliationsPolitical Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Daniel Verdier
Correspondence to Daniel Verdier.
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About this article Cite this articleVerdier, D. Bargaining strategies for governance complex games. Rev Int Organ 17, 349–371 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-020-09407-9
Accepted: 18 November 2020
Published: 07 January 2021
Issue Date: April 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-020-09407-9
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