Suchergebnisse

This dissertation is a critical examination of the activity and politics surrounding the Upper Karnali Hydroelectricity Project (UKH) in western Nepal. Though Nepal has 6,000 rivers, the rural parts of the country are largely without electricity while load shedding prevails in the urban areas up to 12-14 hours per day in the dry season. Against this backdrop, UKH occupies a unique space as Nepal's first mega-project. Debate rages over how UKH should be employed to generate development in Nepal: Should it be used to produce electricity for domestic use or to export the power to India to generate badly-needed state revenue? Contributing to the debate is the presence of UKH's constructor: the GMR Consortium, an India-based infrastructure developer. The debate around GMR and its intentions has laid bare many long-running tensions between Nepal and India around the topic of water and Nepali sovereignty, in general.

A method is presented for empirically modeling simultaneous decisions using the estimation technique of bivariate probit. This technique is used to examine the directed dispute-initiation behavior of the superpowers during the Cold War. Power-transition concepts of satisfaction and rates of capability change can be used to explain directed dispute-initiation behavior. In particular, the international influence of the rival translates into a superpower's dissatisfaction, making dispute initiation by that superpower more likely, ceteris paribus. Additionally, a rapid strengthening of the challenger, ceteris paribus, increases the likelihood of dispute initiation in either direction. Changes in the hegemon's capabilities, though consistent with power-transition theory, have no effect on dispute-initiation behavior. These effects hold even while controlling for various domestic conditions in each country.

Despite many applications of prospect theory's concepts to explain political and strategic phenomena, formal analyses of strategic problems using prospect theory are rare. Using Fearon's model of bargaining, Tversky and Kahneman's value function, and an existing probability weighting function, I construct a model that demonstrates the differences between expected value and prospect theory when applied to strategic interaction. Critically important to this demonstration is an examination of different types of reference points that make sense for bargaining problems. Four types of reference points are discussed and analyzed: power-based, equity, variants of the status quo, and extreme ``I-want-it-all'' reference points. Each of these types of reference points produce different bargaining behavior at the individual level and in combination with the type of reference point of the other actor. Additionally, I demonstrate that bargaining failure is possible for this model under complete and perfect information using prospect-theoretic logic.