Bargaining Strategies for Regime Complex Games

• In Event: The Evolution of Global Governance Complexes

Abstract

International institutional complexes offer member states opportunities for playing off one institutional forum against another with the goal of improving one’s relative bargaining position–a strategy known as "regime shifting". I probe the internal validity of this strategy. Regime shifting typically involves a three-period game: first, a negotiation yields an initial deal; second, an unhappy subset of members shifts the interpretation or implementation of the deal to a forum that is biased in their favour; third, the initial deal is renegotiated. I propose to model the second move as the degrading of part or whole of the initial deal for all parties. The model makes two contributions to the regime complexity 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 forum shifting is more likely to work for the weak than for the strong.

Author

• Daniel Verdier, Ohio State University