ABSTRACT
Since the 1966 publication of a pioneering work by Mancur Olsen, Jr., and Richard Zeckhauser, a small but illuminative body of literature has sought to clarify the actions of alliance partners. The economic theory of an alliance built upon the concept of public good in the theory of public finance has stimulated considerable interest as an analytical framework to understand and predict the incentives and behavior of its members. In the economic theory of alliances, Olsen and Zeckhauser treated the security services provided by such alliances as a pure public good. Thus, their logic led them to the conclusion that a disproportionate division of the burden and a suboptimal resource allocation to defense were inevitable properties of all alliances. The burden-sharing issue is inherent in the nature of an alliance, and any efforts to make determinative judgments about the fair share of the burden are doomed to failure.
