Vinod K. Aggarwal and Cedric Dupont
European Journal of International Relations, 2003
We are pleased that our article ‘Goods, Games and Institutions’ (Aggarwal and Dupont, 1999) has generated considerable interest (Wallner, 2002; Aggarwal and Dupont, 2002). Our basic objective was to develop a unified theoretical framework linking types of goods with bargaining games, with the goal of better understanding the bases of international cooperation and the role of institutions.
Katharina Holzinger’s article ‘Common Goods, Matrix Games and Institutional Responses’ in EJIR 9(2) develops several very interesting themes. Holzinger provides a somewhat different cut into the relationship of goods, games and institutions that we initially developed, and provides a carefully developed treatment of the implications of this type of modeling work for environmental regulation. We continue to believe that this avenue of theoretical and empirical work will prove highly productive, and commend Holzinger for her useful extensions and empirical application of our modeling approach.
In an effort to provide the reader with an overview of advances in research in this area, we focus on three issues — (1) the conceptual nature of public goods and common pool resources (CPRs); (2) the modeling of the provision problem; and (3) the value of institutions in the provision of goods.