Are Sanctions Effective?

Abstract

Although economic sanctions have been quite frequent in the twentieth century, a close examination of the low success rate (33 out of 83 cases) indicates that sender countries are not able to select the appropriate cases. Moreover, analysts sometimes offer contradictory advice for such selection. This article provides a game-theoretic explanation of these phenomena. Six different game-theoretic scenarios lead to the same equilibrium outcome. This is a mixed strategy equilibrium. The success ratio is the outcome of the selection of mixed strategies by both sender and receiver countries. Under a wide range of (specified) circumstances, the size of the sanction has no impact upon the behavior of the target country. Finally, some empirical implications of the game-theoretic analysis are compared to existing empirical generalizations, and further implications for empirical research are discussed.