Current Research

Water Resources in South Asia: An Assessment of Climate Change and Vulnerability.

The mandate for the Fred J. Hansen Institute for World Peace (HWP) is to bring hostile nations together for building peace through joint projects of mutual interest. As a part of the HWP, I am working on a joint project ton water resources that involve India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. This three-year project, funded by a multinational agency called the Asia Pacific Network aims at producing the first comprehensive regional study of the socio-economic impacts of extremes of weather (drought along the Indo-Pak border region and flooding in Nepal, Bangladesh, and eastern India).

A Proposal for Generalizing Individual Choice Model (with Professor Taradas Banyopadhayay, University of California, Riverside).

Despite its dazzling intellectual achievements, traditional microeconomics remains somewhat inadequate in explaining full range of human social behavior, particularly when the emotive contents of consumption are concerned. Hence, the explanation of a number of social activities including voluntary participation in mass collective movements and altruism remain less than satisfactory; as they are often classified as "irrational" or, a bit more charitably, "a-rational." By arguing that such limitations arise from the traditional theory being restricted to the "commodity space," this paper presents a more generalized model in the "needs space." In our formulation, people make their consumption decision based on their ability to purchase commodities to engage in various activities. However, commodities are not desired for themselves, they are desired to satisfy our fundamental needs of life. Since satisfaction of needs by engaging in activities is based on the psychological attributes of an actor, the advancements in social psychology, anthropology, and even evolutionary biology open a new door for a fuller understanding of our social behavior outside the relative narrow confines of commodity driven models. In this paper we present the outline of a formal model.

Rationality of Suicide Bombing

Although acts of self-sacrifice for a larger cause has been around since the earliest times of recorded history, the events of September 11, brought its extreme form to the attention of the scholars, particularly in the United States. Participation in acts of violent protest, where the actor accepts his or her certain death, has been a rare phenomenon in this country, while citizens of many other, most notably of Israel, Sri Lanka, India, have learned to live with its growing menace. Facing such an extreme behavior, it is easy to dismiss them as "irrational" acts carried on by a handful of fanatics. In this project, I would like to explore the question of rationality of such acts.

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