Schar School Graduate Student Research
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A collection of working papers and other research by Schar School graduate students
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Browsing Schar School Graduate Student Research by Subject "George Mason University"
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Item Constrained Optimization: The State and the Indian Entrepreneur(2007-01-29T20:43:14Z) Banerjee, PritamThe quality of entrepreneurship has been considered by many scholars as a critical factor in the economic development of a society. While some scholars have sought to explain the difference in entrepreneurial quality among societies based on cultural grounds, this paper argues that entrepreneurship is a function of the incentives derived from institutions and the historical context that entrepreneurs face. It also argues that entrepreneurs are not inert actors in the institutional and historical process, but are actively engaged in shaping the political-economic landscape which they inhabit. The paper undertakes an historical analysis of Indian entrepreneurship in the last hundred years as an illustrative example of this theory of entrepreneurial dynamics in a society.Item Non-democratic regimes as bargaining process(2010-02-25T20:52:07Z) Aslam, GhaziaMany questions about the characteristics of dictatorships and the process and likelihood of their transition towards democracy remain unanswered. In this paper, we contend that in order to get a comprehensive picture of a dictatorial regime and its prospects of democratization, we need to highlight the importance of “free activity” in the strategic interaction between the dictator and the citizens–the dynamics of “bargaining, for the reaching of understandings and misunderstandings, for accommodation and co-operation and for conjectures about each other’s decision processes, value systems and information” (Schelling, 1961). We specifically analyze three strategies that participants use under different circumstances in an attempt to achieve their most favorable outcome: changing the payoffs of the opponents, “burning” money by a participant to signal his intentions about the future action and the use of brinkmanship. In doing so, we learn about the behavior of the participants that usually remains out of reach of straightforward analysis. The framework generates a variety of potential behavior within a framework of a few variables and constraints and is therefore able to generate hypotheses about relationships among various variables of interest.