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The authors present a game-theoretic analysis of negotiations involving two players: the government of a country of origin and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in which the latter represents refugees, countries of asylum, and donor countries at the negotiating table. Ordinal preference orderings of outcomes allow the authors to represent the attitudes of governments in countries of origin toward their refugees as well as the urgency of repatriation for countries of asylum and donor countries. For alternative configurations of preference orderings, the authors analyze repatriation negotiations using classical game theory and the theory of moves, which assume different rules of play. They find the theory of moves is better suited for understanding efforts to achieve repatriation agreements in actual refugee crises and conclude with reflections on the difficulties of reaching repatriation agreements in recent years.

The author distinguishes between two types of costly signals that state leaders might employ in trying to credibly communicate their foreign policy interests to other states, whether in the realm of grand strategy or crisis diplomacy. Leaders might either (a) fie hands by creating audience costs that they will suffer ex post if they do not follow through on their threat or commitment (i.e., costs arising from the actions of domestic political audiences) or (b) sink costs by taking actions such as mobilizing troops that are financially costly ex ante. Analysis of a game model depicting the essentials of each case yields two principal results. First, in the games' equilibria, leaders never bluff with either type of signal; they do not incur or create costs and then fail to respond if challenged. Second, leaders do better on average by tying hands, despite the fact that the ability to do so creates a greater ex ante risk of war than does the use of sunk-cost signals. These results and the logic behind them may help explain some empirical features of international signaling, such as many crises' appearance as competitions in creating domestic political audience costs. They also generate empirical puzzles, such as why the seemingly plausible logic of inference that undermines bluffing in the model does not operate in all empirical cases.

There is renewed interest in the relationship between domestic politics and international affairs in the wake of the end of the Cold War and theoretical developments in the area of foreign relations. It is shown that game theory can be applied to rigorously examine how states' foreign policy behavior is influenced by the simultaneous and interactive impact of variables on the national and international levels.

Three-party negotiations are analyzed in which the players are able not only to rank alternatives but also have a preference for impasse. In a dynamic model, players progressively invoke fallback positions to try to prevent inferior outcomes from being implemented in a game of incomplete information. A player's intransigence, or unwillingness to retreat to fallback positions, generally works to his or her advantage. Greater size - or, equivalently, an enhanced ability to effect preferred outcomes - also helps, but intransigence is a potent force by itself. In fact, intransigence may prevail despite the fact that there is a so-called Condorcet alternative that could defeat it and all other alternatives. The analysis illuminates the rational basis of disagreement and why it develops in the manner it does. Extensions of the dynamic model are discussed, including making the preferences of the players for impasse endogenous.

It is well known that inferential errors can induce nice but provocable strategies to engage in vendettas with each other. It is therefore generally believed that imperfect monitoring reduces the payoffs of such strategies and impairs the evolution of cooperation. The current literature, however, only scrutinizes specific strategies, either analytically or in particular tournaments. This article examines in a more general way how monitoring uncertainty affects the fate of cooperation in tournaments of the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD). The first set of results shows that imperfect monitoring does create a sharp trade-off between cooperativeness and unexploitability. The second set examines how random shocks affect the tournament payoffs of several large classes of strategies in the IPD, and shows how noise can help certain nice strategies. The third set analyzes how imperfect monitoring can facilitate the emergence of cooperation based on a population of non-nice strategies. Thus the idea that inferential uncertainty always harms nice strategies and always impairs the evolution of cooperation must be sharply qualified.

The concept of symmetric and asymmetric volunteer's dilemma (VOD) is discussed. The VOD states that each player is willing to cooperate individually under a given waiting period commonly referred to as the volunteer's timing dilemma (VTD). The study attempts to analyze equilibrium behavior in the VTD through the use of game-theory models. In addition, extensive comparisons of the equilibrium properties of the VOD and the VTD are presented.

Recent studies of uncertainty in international relations treat nation-states as unitary actors, but it may be more realistic to suppose that uncertainty also arises from domestic decision-making processes. By formalizing Putnam's theory of two-level games, this article attempts to integrate the studies of uncertainty and the 'second image.' The distinction between domestic and international asymmetric information turns out to be subtle yet important. When there is complete information and international asymmetric information, domestic constraints may or may not enhance bargaining power; but they do not make successful ratification difficult. On the other hand, when there is incomplete domestic information, successful ratification is not guaranteed although the expected payoffs of the constrained negotiators may be still greater than without domestic constraints.

I assume that politicians maximize domestic political support subject to a political feasibility constraint set by the relationship between environmental quality and some politically desirable economic performance indicator. Because pollution flows across national frontiers, the political feasibility frontier depends on other nations' environmental policies. Depending on the nature of domestic political pressures and the environmental spillovers between the countries, various game structures are possible. Knowledge of the structure of the game is helpful when addressing policy issues and the question of how to design international institutions in order to overcome international environmental collective action problems.

A game-theoretic model is developed to identify the conditions under which democratic institutions enhance a country's compliance with international commitments. It shows that although electoral institutions intensify politicians' accountability to domestic constituents, the direction of this electoral effect on compliance is determined by the political attributes of competing interests.