The Shadow of the Future and International Bargaining: The Occurrence of Bargaining in a Three-Phase Cooperation Framework

This paper seeks to answer an important question in international cooperation theory. if cooperation requires successful bargaining among states, then what factors bring these states to the negotiation table in the first place? It presents a game-theoretic model of the "prebargaining" phase of the international cooperation problem, positing that states are more likely to enter a bargaining phase when the shadow of the future is long. This hypothesis is then tested in statistical models that explore how different shadow of the future indicators affect the probability of negotiations over territorial, river, and maritime claims in the Western Hemisphere.