The Political Economy of Sanctions on Iran:Mechanism Design and Agent-Based Modeling Approach

I International relations are full of complexities due to their multifaceted and multilateral nature. To understand decision making processes and the payoffs of their strategies, players are enabled to utilize their capabilities to impact the strategic decision payoffs. As an example of this decision structure we can refer to the international disputes and conflicts including the sanctions. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s interests in international arena have been influenced by the changing interests of the other stakeholders in the coalition of the United States sanction against Iran. In order to analyze and predict the equilibriums of the players positions in the complex international space of the sanctions, game theory, mechanism design, multi-agent systems, and artificial intelligent as new instruments of decision theory are utilized to resolve the transactions and processes influenced by the human decisions. In this research, a policy spectrum is defined according to the strategies of Iran, the United States of America and other stakeholder’s countries. Modeling and simulating the behavior of players on this continuous spectrum which includes two extremes of capitulation and confrontation shows that in the current situation, Iran’s equilibrium and dominated strategy is emphasizing the maintenance of the current agreement in JCPOA, although this position is in the lower range of the spectrum of the current agreement. In these sanctions there is a possibility of a tragedy of the commons. In order to prevent its occurrence, the results of this study imply that the dominant strategy, given that all the players are rational, is to preserve stability, security, and integrity of Iran as a regional power. In order to achieve a stable equilibrium of the game, the stakeholders try to maximize the social welfare function instead of individual participants’ payoff. The rational strategy of Iran is to stay in JCPOA, strengthening political ties with the European players, and to empower its own military and social securities.