A multilevel theory of international relations that accounts for intended and unintended outcomes of cooperation and conflict

Now available in paperback, with an all new Reader's guide, The New York Times and Business Week bestseller Co-opetition revolutionized the game of business. With over 40,000 copies sold and now in its 9th printing, Co-opetition is a business strategy that goes beyond the old rules of competition and cooperation to combine the advantages of both. Co-opetition is a pioneering, high profit means of leveraging business relationships. Intel, Nintendo, American Express, NutraSweet, American Airlines, and dozens of other companies have been using the strategies of co-opetition to change the game of business to their benefit. Formulating strategies based on game theory, authors Brandenburger and Nalebuff created a book that's insightful and instructive for managers eager to move their companies into a new mind set.

Middle Eastern politics of the 1990s have been characterized by a drive towards peace. Whether this is successful or not will depend on the negotiating process. These articles discuss the challenges, and provide some practical advice on how risks of failure could be avoided.

Economists assume that people make choices based on their preferences and their budget constraints. The preferences and values of others play no role in the standard economic model. This feature has been sharply criticized by other social scientists, who believe that the choices people make are also conditioned by social and cultural forces. Economists, meanwhile, are not satisfied with standard sociological and anthropological concepts and explanations because they are not embedded in a testable, analytic framework. In this book, Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy provide such a framework by including the social environment along with standard goods and services in their utility functions. These extended utility functions provide a way of analyzing how changes in the social environment affect people’s choices and behaviors. More important, they also provide a way of analyzing how the social environment itself is determined by the interactions of individuals. Using this approach, the authors are able to explain many puzzling phenomena, including patterns of drug use, how love affects marriage patterns, neighborhood segregation, the prices of fine art and other collectibles, the social side of trademarks, the rise and fall of fads and fashions, and the distribution of income and status.

Strategically placed on the global chess board, as well as controlling vast oil resources, the Middle East was one of the main theatres of Cold War. In the 1950s the Soviet Union had taken advantage of Arab Nationalists’ disillusion with British and French Imperialism, along with the emerging Arab-Israeli conflict, to establish relations with Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The United States responded by moving in to shore up the Western position. Confrontation was inevitable. Superpower Intervention in the Middle East was written in 1978, when this confrontation was at its height. The book’s main theme focuses on how the superpowers became competitively involved in local Middle East conflicts over which they could exercise only limited control, and the risks of nuclear confrontation of the kind which occurred at the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The threat to Western oil supplies is also examined. This is a fascinating work, of great relevance to scholars and students of Middle Eastern history and political diplomacy, as well as those with an interest in the relationship between the Western superpowers and this volatile region.