  Since Nozick's essay, theorists have frequently treated the making of a conditional threat as an essential factor in coercion. The largest single effort expended in analyzing coercion has been devoted to making sense of such threats, and determining their relationship to coercion. Some, however, have questioned the linking of coercion with threats, and suggested that conditional offers too can be coercive. Both conditional threats and conditional offers can be said to be proposals, where the distinction between them is their relationship to some baseline representing the coercee's situation prior to the proposal: compared to the baseline, threats worsen the coercee's situation, while offers do not. In this and the next two sections, we'll examine some of the issues involved here. In Section 2.5 we'll consider some approaches to coercion that attempt to escape from a “baseline” analysis of threats and offers.