Sanctions and Inducements: Insights from Behavioral Economics and Psychology

The paper will apply insights from behavioral psychology and economics to examine why extending both positive and negative inducements to proliferating states is a process ridden with risk and uncertainty. It’ll focus on key problems in studies of sanctions and inducements that presuppose full rationality, such as the fallacy of assuming one “evident” state-level preference or the tendency to pronounce sanctions as having “worked” or “not worked” while ignoring the nuanced and non-linear nature of outcomes.