The Choice of International Institutions: Cooperation, Alternatives and Strategies.

We develop a framework that explains the choice of institutions to address international cooperation problems. We begin with boundedly rational actors who make institutional choices based on the properties of the cooperation problem they face and the menu of international institutions available to them. If the institutional status quo offers an appropriate venue for the prevailing cooperation problem, then actors will either use a focal institution or select a readily available alternative; if no suitable venue is available in the institutional status quo then costlier and riskier strategies of institutional change and creation will be pursued. The framework further allows us to incorporate international organizations as actors affecting the choice menu of states, to combine elements of rationalist and constructivist instructional accounts, and to address distributional and power considerations inherent to the choice of international institutions. A set of empirical articles follow and build on this framework to advances our understanding of the choice of institutions in different international issues. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]