Reputation and International Cooperation

In this project we are interested in how reputations affect international cooperation. In particular, we are interested in studying how the cost of cooperation changes for countries who fail to uphold their international commitments. We anticipate that this happens via two mechanisms. The first is direct: a change in beliefs about the state's reliability in the eyes of other countries. The second is indirect: a concern that failing to punish a state for non-cooperative behavior will invite more non-cooperative behavior in the future. States, we suspect, are thus concerned with developing a reputation for tolerating non-cooperative behavior. We use survey experiments on the US public and elites to study these questions.