| Summary: | Anne van Aaken and Betül Simsek's article represents a significant contribution to the literature on international legal compliance. It pushes forward our understanding of the role that positive incentives play in its promotion, usefully highlights potential tradeoffs between positive and negative incentives, and identifies ways in which rewards and penalties may be employed together. While the authors suggest that a richer understanding of rewarding is useful for questions of institutional design, they purposefully focus on the compliance-side of the coin. This essay builds on their theoretical and conceptual ground-clearing to consider rewarding's implications for treaty negotiations and design. In doing so, it focuses on the role that time implicitly plays in the authors’ analysis and argues that assumptions about time horizons inflect all design calculations. For this reason, understandings of temporal dynamics should be foregrounded in both academic and policy realms.
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