Political Power in the International Coffee Organization: A Research Note

In recent decades, international commodity agreements have been proposed as a way of promoting "development." Behrman, McNicol and others have analyzed them from a purely economic point of view. Fisher, Krasner, and others have adopted a more political perspective. In this article, we seek to advance the political analysis of such agreements. We do so by studying the allocation of export entitlements in the International Coffee Organization (ICO). In the ICO, as in other international organizations, political processes replace markets in the allocation of source resources. In the case of the ICO, allocational decisions are made by majority rule. Given the possibility of strategic behavior in such political environments, game theory should provide a useful set of tools for the analysis of such institutions. A particular interest of this article is the appropriateness of a specific solution concept--the Shapley value--to the analysis of politically contrived allocations under the ICO.