The expected prospects for peace in Northern Ireland

Negotiations over implementation of the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreements are used to compare predictions made by prospect theory and an expected utility model. The ex ante predictions were made in May 1999 and are evaluated against developments through August 2000. The study shows that prospect theory is capable of more limited predictions than expected utility models because the latter can be imbedded in a framework that attends to strategic interaction while the former is strictly decision theoretic at this time. Prospect theory proved accurate in 40-70 percent of its predictions, depending on how one interprets the meaning of "implementation." The expected utility model proved accurate in 100 percent of the issues evaluated here.