After Hegemony Quotes

“International regimes perform the valuable functions of reducing the costs of legitimate transactions, while increasing the costs of illegitimate ones, and of reducing uncertainty. International regimes by no means substitute for bargaining; on the contrary, they authorize certain types of bargaining for certain purposes. Their most important function is to facilitate negotiations leading to mutually beneficial agreements among governments. Regimes also affect incentives for compliance by linking issues together and by being linked together themselves. Behavior on one set of questions necessarily affects others’ actions with regard to other matters.”
― Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy

“In the first place, Coase specified three crucial conditions for his conclusion to hold. These were: a legal framework establishing liability for actions, presumably supported by governmental authority; perfect information; and zero transaction costs (including organization costs and the costs of making side-payments). It is absolutely clear that none of these conditions is met in world politics. World government does not exist, making property rights and rules of legal liability fragile; information is extremely costly and often held unequally by different actors; transaction costs, including costs of organization and side-payments, are often very high. Thus an inversion of the Coase theorem would seem more appropriate to our subject. In the absence of the conditions that Coase specified, coordination will often be thwarted by dilemmas of collective action.”
― Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy