How does cooperation emerge in a condition of international anarchy? Michael Tomz sheds new light on this fundamental question through a study of international debt across three centuries. Tomz develops a reputational theory of cooperation between sovereign governments and foreign investors. He explains how governments acquire reputations in the eyes of investors, and argues that concerns about reputation sustain international lending and repayment. Tomz's theory generates novel predictions about the dynamics of cooperation: how investors treat first-time borrowers, how access to credit evolves as debtors become more seasoned, and how countries ascend and descend the reputational ladder by acting contrary to investors' expectations. Tomz systematically tests his theory and the leading alternatives across three centuries of financial history. His remarkable data, gathered from archives in nine countries, cover all sovereign borrowers. He deftly combines statistical methods, case studies, and content analysis to scrutinize theories from as many angles as possible. Tomz finds strong support for his reputational theory while challenging prevailing views about sovereign debt. His pathbreaking study shows that, across the centuries, reputations have guided lending and repayment in consistent ways. Moreover, Tomz uncovers surprisingly little evidence of punitive enforcement strategies. Creditors have not compelled borrowers to repay by threatening military retaliation, imposing trade sanctions, or colluding to deprive defaulters of future loans. He concludes by highlighting the implications of his reputational logic for areas beyond sovereign debt, further advancing our understanding of the puzzle of cooperation under anarchy.

This 2004 book aims at advancing our understanding of the influences international norms and international institutions have over the incentives of states to cooperate on issues such as environment and trade. Contributors adopt two different approaches in examining this question. One approach focuses on the constitutive elements of the international legal order, including customary international law, soft law and framework conventions, and on the types of incentives states have, such as domestic incentives and reputation. The other approach examines specific issues in the areas of international environment protection and international trade. The combined outcome of these two approaches is an understanding of the forces that pull states toward closer cooperation or prevent them from doing so, and the impact of different types of international norms and diverse institutions on the motivation of states. The insights gained suggest ways for enhancing states' incentives to cooperate through the design of norms and institutions.

By approaching an important foreign policy issue from a new angle, Jonathan Mercer comes to a startling, controversial discovery: a nation's reputation is not worth fighting for. He presents the most comprehensive examination to date of what defines a reputation, when it is likely to emerge in international politics, and with what consequences. Mercer examines reputation formation in a series of crises before World War I. He tests competing arguments, one from deterrence theory, the other from social psychology, to see which better predicts and explains how reputations form. Extending his findings to address recent crises such as the Gulf War, he also considers how culture, gender, and nuclear weapons affect reputation. Throughout history, wars have been fought in the name of reputation. Mercer rebuts this politically powerful argument, shows that reputations form differently than we thought, and offers policy advice to decision-makers.

This book is a comprehensive study of cooperation among the advanced capitalist countries. Can cooperation persist without the dominance of a single power, such as the United States after World War II? To answer this pressing question, Robert Keohane analyzes the institutions, or "international regimes," through which cooperation has taken place in the world political economy and describes the evolution of these regimes as American hegemony has eroded. Refuting the idea that the decline of hegemony makes cooperation impossible, he views international regimes not as weak substitutes for world government but as devices for facilitating decentralized cooperation among egoistic actors. In the preface the author addresses the issue of cooperation after the end of the Soviet empire and with the renewed dominance of the United States, in security matters, as well as recent scholarship on cooperation.

Gossip and reputation are core processes in societies and have substantial consequences for individuals, groups, communities, organizations, and markets.. Academic studies have found that gossip and reputation have the power to enforce social norms, facilitate cooperation, and act as a means of social control. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is gossip - evaluative talk about absent third parties. Reputation and gossip are inseparably intertwined, but up until now have been mostly studied in isolation. The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation fills this intellectual gap, providing an integrated understanding of the foundations of gossip and reputation, as well as outlining a potential framework for future research. Volume editors Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittek bring together a diverse group of researchers to analyze gossip and reputation from different disciplines, social domains, and levels of analysis. Being the first integrated and comprehensive collection of studies on both phenomena, each of the 25 chapters explores the current research on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of the gossip-reputation link in contexts as diverse as online markets, non-industrial societies, organizations, social networks, or schools. International in scope, the volume is organized into seven sections devoted to the exploration of a different facet of gossip and reputation. Contributions from eminent experts on gossip and reputation not only help us better understand the complex interplay between two delicate social mechanisms, but also sketch the contours of a long term research agenda by pointing to new problems and newly emerging cross-disciplinary solutions.

How do countries form reputations? Do these reputations affect interstate politics in the global arena? Reputations abound in world politics, but we know little about how state reputations form and how they evolve over time. We frequently use words like trust, credibility, resolve, integrity, risk, known commodity, and brand, to name a few, overlapping with reputation like a Venn diagram. As a result, the concept of reputation often gets stretched or diluted, weakening our ability to ascertain its role in cooperation and conflict. In this book, Crescenzi develops a theory of reputation dynamics to help identify when reputations form in ways that affect world politics, both in the realms of international conflict and cooperation. A reputation for honoring one's obligations in a treaty, for example, can make a state a more attractive ally. A reputation for war and conflict can trigger more of the same, leading to a cycle of violence that exacerbates security challenges. While these processes of cooperation and conflict seem distinct, they are linked by a common use of the information held in each state's reputation. In each case, states use reputational information in an attempt to resolve the uncertainty they face when crafting foreign policy decisions. With this theory in place, Crescenzi uses a blend of historical and empirical analysis to convince the reader that reputations do indeed matter in world politics. Moreover, we are able to identify patterns of reputation's influence in international relations. He demonstrates that over time and across the globe, reputations for conflict exacerbate crises while reputations for cooperation and reliability make future cooperation more likely.