Short reading pathways in game theory and international relations. Learners may test out of any pathway whose concepts they can already apply.
Strategic Actors and Credible Commitments
This pathway covers the vocabulary of strategic interaction: players, payoffs, equilibrium, repeated play, and what makes a commitment credible rather than merely announced. Start with the short primer, and go on to the longer pieces only if those ideas are new.
A short, nontechnical primer on players, strategies, payoffs, equilibrium, simultaneous and sequential moves, repeated games, and incomplete information. A good place to test out of this pathway if these are already familiar.
Sarwat Jahan and Ahmed Saber Mahmud (2015)
A deeper introduction to strategic interaction, from utility and equilibrium to repeated games and commitment, including the distinction between passive environments and strategic agents. Focus on §1 and §6.
Don Ross (rev. 2023)
Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs
Explains two ways to make foreign-policy signals credible: tying hands through future audience costs, and sinking costs in advance, and compares their strategic effects. Read pp. 68–75.
James D. Fearon (1997)
Detection, Attribution, and Response
Evidence does not enforce itself. These two readings follow arms-control evidence from collection through interpretation into a compliance judgment, and then on to the institution with the authority to respond.
Witness for the Prosecution: International Organizations and Arms Control Verification
Explains how arms-control evidence is gathered, interpreted, converted into compliance judgments, and connected to institutional authority and proportionate response. Selected sections.
Edward Ifft (2005)
Monitoring and Verification in Arms Control
A practical primer on monitoring and verification regimes: treaty obligations, technical collection, inspections, confidence building, analysis, and political judgment.
Amy F. Woolf (2011)
International Bargaining and Domestic Implementation
A government negotiating abroad still has to get the result through its own politics at home, and it often hands the monitoring work to an international body. These two readings cover both moves.
Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games
Models diplomacy as a two-level game in which governments bargain internationally while securing domestic ratification, introducing the concept of win-sets. Read pp. 433–441.
Robert D. Putnam (1988)
Delegation under Anarchy: States, International Organizations, and Principal-Agent Theory
Uses principal–agent theory to explain why states delegate authority to international organizations, how delegation can enhance credibility, and where agency slack emerges. Selected pages.
Hawkins, Lake, Nielson and Tierney (2006)
Supply-Chain Structure and Bargaining Power
AI verification will run through a supply chain that a few states and firms control at a handful of points. This pathway asks what that control is actually worth: when a chokepoint becomes usable leverage, and when economic dependence fails to convert into political influence.
Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion
Shows how states exploit control over central nodes in financial and information networks through panopticon and chokepoint effects. Read pp. 42–61.
Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman (2019)
Economic Interdependence, Bargaining Power, and Political Influence
Uses bargaining theory to show why asymmetric economic dependence does not automatically translate into political influence or usable leverage.
R. Harrison Wagner (1988)
Written Output
Choose one element of the advanced-AI supply chain and build an actor, authority, and evidence map for it: who the actors are, what authority each one holds, and what evidence would let an outside party verify their behavior. Draw on whichever pathway above is most relevant.