Is There a Broader-Deeper Trade-Off

Many scholars have argued that there is a tradeoff between the breadth and depth of multilateral institutions. I show that such a tradeoff does not exist for a broad class of multilateral cooperation problems. The conclusion that there is a broader-deeper tradeoff follows from the questionable, or at least not very general, assumption that the members of the multilateral must choose a single policy that is applicable to all members. The multilateral agreement modeled in this paper allows countries to set their policies at different levels. Once this change is made, there is no broader-deeper tradeoff, a finding which has obvious empirical and policy implications. It explains why some regimes are created with fairly large memberships at the outset, and it calls into question the policy prescription of limiting membership of multilateral institutions to a small group of committed cooperators for a large class of cooperation problems. Acknowledgments I am especially indebted to Marek Kaminski, Antonio Merlo and an anonymous reviewer for their help with the analysis in this paper. I would also like to thank Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Adam Przeworski, Shanker Satyanath and the participants at seminars at UC-Berkeley and Rutgers University for comments on earlier drafts of this work. All errors remain my responsibility. 1 Is there a broader-deeper tradeoff