The expected prospects for peace in Northern Ireland

Negotiations over implementation of the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreem ents are used to compare predictions made by prospect theory and an expecte d utility model. The ex ante predictions were made in May 1999 and are eval uated against developments through August 2000. The study shows that prospe ct theory is capable of more limited predictions than expected utility mode ls because the latter can be imbedded in a framework that attends to strate gic interaction while the former is strictly decision theoretic at this tim e. Prospect theory proved accurate in 40-70 percent of its predictions, dep ending on how one interprets the meaning of "implementation." The expected utility model proved accurate in 100 percent of the issues evaluated here.