This research note highlights an important element missing from rational design theories of international agreements: "institutional context"-the presence or absence of existing and prior agreements between prospective partners in "new" cooperation. If, as rational design theorists argue, agreement design is deliberate, strategic, and directed toward enhancing contracting parties' ability to credibly commit to future cooperation, then prior design "successes" should influence the terms of additional cooperation. We test for this omitted variable problem in three agreement design outcomes: ex ante limitations on agreement duration, exit clauses, and disputesettlement provisions. Through an augmentation and reanalysis of data from a key study in the rational design literature-Barbara Koremenos's "Contracting Around International Uncertainty"-we show institutional context is positively correlated with inclusion of ex ante time limitations in negotiated agreements and negatively correlated with the inclusion of exit clauses and third-party dispute-settlement provisions. Institutional context also mediates and conditions the effects of the explanatory variable at the heart of existing rational design theories-uncertainty about the future distribution of gains from cooperation. Our findings show that the collective appeal of particular design features varies not only with the nature of underlying strategic problems, but also with degrees of shared institutional context. Rationalist explanations of international cooperation have long treated institutions as efforts to resolve collective action problems and achieve mutual gains. Early studies described the underlying challenges using basic game-theoretic structures such as the Prisoners' Dilemma. 1 More recent work further distills these structures into problems of credibility, distributional conflict, monitoring, and enforcement. 2 This convention has carried over to work on the "rational design" of international institutions, which is grounded in the intuitively appealing idea that states craft agreements to tackle

Regulating private transactions across international boundaries has long posed a challenge to states+ Extraterritoriality-the direct regulation of persons and conduct outside a state's borders-is an increasingly common mechanism by which strong states attempt to manage problems associated with transnational activities+ This article seeks to account for variation across issues in the willingness of U+S+ courts to regulate extraterritorially by focusing on the potential for external conduct to undermine domestic legal rules+ It suggests further how attention to domestic-level regulatory processes, with particular focus on the role of private actors, can shed new light on transnational rulemaking and enforcement+ Regulating the conduct of transnational actors has long posed a challenge for states+ Global economic integration, however, has given questions of regulatory convergence and divergence new scope and urgency+ Governance problems arise because states' legal rules generally operate only within their respective territories, whereas a single transnational act can, by definition, have consequences in several states+ Segmenting cross-border conduct into location-specific components for regulatory purposes is often impossible+ While governments can sometimes agree on the desirability of regulatory harmonization, achieving it on a practical level is difficult+ 1 One approach to regulating transnational conduct that has become increasingly common in recent decades involves courts and other domestic-level institutions claiming direct authority over entire transactions, including those elements out-I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions+ I would also like to thank participants in the

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