Re-Election Incentives and the Sustainability of International Cooperation
38 Pages Posted: 22 Mar 2006
Date Written: December 2005
Abstract
This paper examines the impact of policy-makers' horizons on the sustainability of international cooperation. We describe a prisoners' dilemma game between two infinitely-lived organizations (countries) run by agents (policy-makers) with a shorter tenure. The agents' mandates are finite but potentially renewable and staggered across different organizations. We show that the efficient cooperative equilibrium is only sustainable when policy-makers are re-electable. Moreover, re-election incentives can act as a discipline device, making it easier to sustain cooperation between policy-makers with renewable mandates than between policy-makers who are automatically re-elected. However, if the chances of re-election depend significantly on recent performance, policy-makers will collude to get re-elected. In this case, term limits may help to sustain international cooperation.
Keywords: Self-enforcing cooperation, re-election incentives, overlapping generations
JEL Classification: C72, D72, F0
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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