Through our commitment to new products-whether digital journals or entirely new forms of communication-we have continued to look for the most efficient and effective means to serve our readership. Since the late 1960s, we have experimented with generation after generation of electronic publishing tools. The Press's enthusiasm for innovation is reflected in our continuing exploration of this frontier. We were among the first university presses to offer titles electronically and we continue to adopt technologies that allow us to better support the scholarly mission and disseminate our content widely. The authors of the articles in this special issue of International Organization evaluate the conjectures in specific issue-areas and the overall Rational Design approach.Īmong the largest university presses in the world, The MIT Press publishes over 200 new books each year along with 30 journals in the arts and humanities, economics, international affairs, history, political science, science and technology along with other disciplines.
We draw on rational choice theory to develop a series of empirically falsifiable conjectures that explain this institutional variation. We identify five important features of institutions-membership, scope, centralization, control, and flexibility-and explain their variation in terms of four independent variables that characterize different cooperation problems: distribution, number of actors, enforcement, and uncertainty. In this article we introduce the theoretical framework of the Rational Design project. Why do international institutions vary so widely in terms of such key institutional features as membership, scope, and flexibility? We argue that international actors are goal-seeking agents who make specific institutional design choices to solve the particular cooperation problems they face in different issue-areas.
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