Rewarding Impatience: A Bargaining and Enforcement Model of OPEC Lisa Blaydes Abstract In this article, I make two primary contributions to the literature on international cooperation+ First, I present a simple version of Fearon’s bargaining and enforcement model and show that impatience ~as captured in the discount fac- tor! can be a source of bargaining strength when the outcome of the bargaining phase is followed by an enforcement phase that resembles a prisoners’ dilemma+ Second, I illustrate how to apply this model to the question of the division of cartel profits within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries ~OPEC!, particularly with regard to the relationship between bargaining strength and disparate time horizons+ I find that for some critical threshold level, states that discount the future more heav- ily tend to receive better oil production offers than those that do not+ I examine em- pirical evidence that suggests that countries in OPEC fall into the range where this proposition holds; in other words, relatively poor, populous countries and relatively unstable ones are allowed by OPEC to overproduce+ Since the British sector of the North Sea came on line in 1975, many OPEC coun- tries felt compelled to regain market share through rounds of unofficial discount- ing and sanctioned price cuts+ By early 1983, the world oil market was in crisis, and a complete price collapse appeared imminent when the British National Oil Company further cut the price of North Sea crude by three dollars to thirty dollars a barrel+ Of all the OPEC nations, Nigeria competed most directly with the British, as both countries produced oil of similar grade and sold that oil predominantly to the European market+ During the two-year period leading up to 1983, the Nigerian government, a new democracy , watched as sales of its nation’s oil dropped from two million to less than one-half million barrels a day + During this same period, the government faced declining foreign exchange reserves, acute unemployment, and elections scheduled for August 1983+ In an effort to drive down unemploy- I am grateful to Christino Arroyo, Jim DeNardo, Joe Gochal, James Honaker, Shuhei Kurizaki, Drew Linzer, Barry O’Neill, Art Stein, Hiroki Takeuchi, George Tsebelis, Jana von Stein, and two anony- mous referees for helpful comments+ I am especially indebted to Ken Schultz for his advice and to Randy Calvert for a helpful discussion during the 2003 EITM Summer Institute at Washington Uni- versity in St+ Louis+ International Organization 58, Spring 2004, pp+ 213–237 © 2004 by The IO Foundation+ DOI: 10+10170S0020818304582012