Relative Gains and the Pattern of International Cooperation

Abstract

Many political situations involve competitions where winning is more important than doing well. In international politics, this relative gains problem is widely argued to be a major impediment to cooperation under anarchy. After discussing why states might seek relative gains, I demonstrate that the hypothesis holds very different implications from those usually presumed. Relative gains do impede cooperation in the two-actor case and provide an important justification for treating international anarchy as a prisoner's dilemma problem; but if the initial absolute gains situation is not a prisoner's dilemma, relative gains seeking is much less consequential. Its significance is even more attenuated with more than two competitors. Relative gains cannot prop up the realist critique of international cooperation theory, but may affect the pattern of cooperation when a small number of states are the most central international actors.