Individuals, communities and nations in all regions of the world are experiencing the effects of climate and human induced changes in their physical and social environments. The highest and the most direct impact of these changes are seen in the case of commons (e.g., fisheries, shellfish beds, coastal spaces, lagoons, mangroves, range lands, forests, groundwater, freshwater systems, irrigation systems, urban spaces, etc.) upon which humans depend for their social, cultural and economic needs. When impacted by a variety of drivers, commons not only go through a process of change in their biophysical characteristics, but the resulting impacts linger on to the social, cultural, political and economic lives (e.g., loss of livelihoods, subsistence, institutions, disempowerment, loss of rights, cultural identity) of the commons-dependent population. In a similar sense we all, as humans, are linked to some form of commons in our daily lives we either impact the commons or get impacted by it or experience the both. Given this background, sustaining the commons remains an ongoing challenge that requires enhanced understanding and innovative governance approaches at all levels of society. The aim of this course is exactly to do this, i.e., creatively engage students in furthering their understanding and knowledge on commons and deliberate on novel governance approaches though which commons can be sustained.

Governing the Commons

After the end of World War II, the United States, by far the dominant economic and military power at that time, joined with the surviving capitalist democracies to create an unprecedented institutional framework. By the 1980s many contended that these institutions--the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund--were threatened by growing economic nationalism in the United States, as demonstrated by increased trade protection and growing budget deficits. In this book, Robert Gilpin argues that American power had been essential for establishing these institutions, and waning American support threatened the basis of postwar cooperation and the great prosperity of the period. For Gilpin, a great power such as the United States is essential to fostering international cooperation. Exploring the relationship between politics and economics first highlighted by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and other thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gilpin demonstrated the close ties between politics and economics in international relations, outlining the key role played by the creative use of power in the support of an institutional framework that created a world economy. Gilpin's exposition of the in.uence of politics on the international economy was a model of clarity, making the book the centerpiece of many courses in international political economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when American support for international cooperation is once again in question, Gilpin's warnings about the risks of American unilateralism sound ever clearer.

The Political Economy of International Relations

Axelrod's model of the evolution of cooperation was based on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Empirical work following this approach has helped establish the prevalence of cooperation based on reciprocity. Theoretical work has led to a deeper understanding of the role of other factors in the evolution of cooperation: the number of players, the range of possible choices, variation in the payoff structure, noise, the shadow of the future, population dynamics, and population structure. C OOPERATION IS A TOPIC OF CONTINUING INTEREST FOR the social and biological sciences. A theory of cooperation based upon reciprocity (1-3) has engendered a wide literature concerning the evolution of cooperation. In this article, we survey this literature in order to determine what new insights have been gained. Although we shall concentrate on theoretical work, it is important to note that scholars have been active in pursuing empirical applications of the theory. Huth (4) found that military conflict during the last century was most successfully deterred when a challenge was met with reciprocity. Cooperation based on reciprocity has been supported for vampire bats (5, 6), vervet monkeys (7), and sessile invertebrates (8). Experimental simulations of defection have been presented to stickleback fish (9) and tree swallows (10); the findings are consistent with reciprocity. On the other hand, Nol (11) rejected reciprocity as an explanation of cooperation between the sexes in chick-rearing by the American oyster catcher, arguing that data on foraging trips and energy use support a theory based on the efficient allocation of energy by the birds. Other investigators have pointed to the difficulties in determining whether observed cooperation is due to a tit-for-tat-like process (12). Despite these difficulties, cooperation based upon reciprocity has received substantial empirical support.

/pdf/the-further-evolution-of-cooperation-36yxbkftuk.pdf

The Further Evolution of Cooperation

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both comparative politics professors at Harvard University, have written a valuable, high-profile book that provides several useful insights into the current sta...

How Democracies Die

A half-decade after the first systematic applications of prospect theory to international relations, scholars continue to debate its potential utility as a theoretical framework. Key questions include the validity of the experimental findings themselves, their relevance for real-world international behavior that involves high-stakes decisions by collective actors in interactive settings, and the conceptual status of prospect theory with respect to rational choice. In this essay I assess theoretical and methodological debates over these issues. I review work in social psychology and experimental economics and conclude that challenges to the external validity of prospect theory-based hypotheses for international behavior are much more serious than challenges to their internal validity. I emphasize the similarities between prospect theory and expected-utility theory, argue that hypotheses regarding loss aversion and the reflection effect are easily subsumed within the latter, and that evidence of framing effects and nonlinear responses to probabilities are more problematic for the theory. I conclude that priorities for future research include the construction of hypotheses on the framing of foreign policy decisions and research designs for testing them; the incorporation of framing, loss aversion, and the reflection effect into theories of collective and interactive decision making; and experimental research that is sensitive to the political and strategic context of foreign policy decision making.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2600908.pdf

Prospect Theory, Rational Choice, and International Relations

The disposition effect has been characterized in various ways: the “effect, whereby investors are anxious to sell their winners, but reluctant to sell their losers” (Shefrin [2005], pp. 419); “the tendency to hold losers too long and sell winners too soon” (Odean [1998], pp. 1775) and the effect, whereby investors “sell winners more readily than losers” (Odean [1998], pp. 1779). The most discernable aspect of these characterizations is their imprecision, particularly with regard to time. In what follows, we provide a detailed explanation of the disposition effect based on a straightforward application of prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky [1992]; Kahneman and Tversky [1979, 2000]). The analysis begins with the traditional account of the disposition effect (Shefrin and Statman [1985]) and provides precise time-independent concepts that replace “sell too soon” and “hold too long.” The analysis shows when the prospect theory explanation of the disposition effect requires only the valuation function and wh...

A Detailed Prospect Theory Explanation of the Disposition Effect

Using randomly generated sequences of binary events we asked participants to make predictions about the next event. It turned out that while predicting uncertain events, people do not behave unsystematically. Our research identifies four types of relatively consistent strategies for predicting uncertain binary events: a strategy immune to short-run sequential dependencies consisting of the persistent prediction of long-run majority events, hereafter called the long-run momentum strategy; a strategy immune to short-run sequential dependencies consisting of the persistent prediction of long-run minority events, called the long-run contrarian strategy; a strategy sensitive to short-run sequential dependencies consisting of the prediction of short-run majority events, called the short-run momentum strategy; and a strategy sensitive to short-run sequential dependencies consisting of the prediction of short-run minority events, called the short-run contrarian strategy. When the character of events remains unkno...

Perception of randomness and predicting uncertain events

The poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making posits a two-stage process wherein the decision maker first employs a noncompensatory decision rule to eliminate politically unacceptable alternatives and then employs a (perhaps) traditional decision procedure to select from the remaining set of acceptable alternatives. Ageneral decision analysis is used to provide a structured account of the elimination process of the first stage of the poliheuristic theory by displaying a noncompensatory decision rule for eliminating unacceptable policy alternatives. The results show how general decision analysis can be used to specify when an alternative is unacceptable to a political decision maker who is sensitive to public opinion.

Traditional Decision Analysis and the Poliheuristic Theory of Foreign Policy Decision Making

The model developed in this paper provides a formal prospect theory account of Challenger's behavior in the traditional deterrence game played under sequential decision analysis. The model is used ...

Sequential Analysis of Deterrence Games with a Declining Status Quo

The results generated by experimentalists in psychology and economics haveled to numerous advances in the study of human decision making under risk.Camerer (1995) and Rabin (1998) provide excellent reviews of the relevantliterature. These results clearly display the gap between normative theoriesof ideal behavior and descriptive theories of observed behavior. The mostprominent result is loss aversion – the observation that a loss is given greatervalue than a gain of an equal size – and the resulting S-shaped utility function. Rabin puts the key point as follows: ``Researchers have identified a pervasive feature of reference dependence: In a wide variety of domains, people are significantly more averse to losses than they are attracted to same size gains''(Rabin 1998, 13–14). In what follows, I will show that the ``wide variety of domains'' is wide indeed. In particular, I will review the effects of the S-shaped utility function on the resolution of the decision to commit a crime, to decision to violate professional ethics, and the decision to participate in a rebellion.

The S-Shaped Utility Function

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Raymond Dacey

Author Tools

Chat about Author