Reputation, Self-Esteem, and Competitive Rewards

In Rewarding in International Law, Anna van Aaken and Betul Simsek organize and refocus much of the existing literature on international cooperation and compliance highlighting the set of positive and negative tools available. In this essay, I extend the Rewarding framework, making some additional distinctions between the concepts, which both highlight the possibility of rewarding in international law and sketch the limits for such analysis. The first part differentiates rationalistic conceptions of reputation, on the one hand, and behavioral notions of self-esteem, on the other, as analytically distinct mechanisms for rewarding. By pulling these concepts apart, this essay emphasizes the different causal paths for influencing government actors and makes the case for an independent place for self-esteem in the Rewarding framework. In the second part, this essay questions whether rewards are always positive (and thus Pareto efficient) in light of third-party effects. Some rewards are competitive; a reward to one party is a relative punishment to third parties who are competitively disadvantaged by an exclusion from the reward. The incorporation of third-party analysis underscores the political limits of rewarding stemming from third-party resistance to rewarding or, alternatively, demands for additional rewards from third parties that can create capacity concerns for rewarding states.