Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (; born November 24, 1946) is a
political scientist, professor at
New York University, and senior fellow at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
's
Hoover Institution.
Biography
Bueno de Mesquita graduated from
Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant High School (pronounced ), commonly referred to among its students as Stuy (pronounced ), is a State school, public university-preparatory school, college-preparatory, Specialized high schools in New York City, specialized high school ...
in 1963, (along with
Richard Axel and
Alexander Rosenberg
Alexander Rosenberg (who generally publishes as "Alex") is an American philosopher and novelist. He is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, well known for contributions to philosophy of biology and philosophy of economic ...
), earned his BA degree from
Queens College, New York in 1967 and then his MA and PhD from the
University of Michigan. He specializes in
international relations,
foreign policy
A State (polity), state's foreign policy or external policy (as opposed to internal or domestic policy) is its objectives and activities in relation to its interactions with other states, unions, and other political entities, whether bilaterall ...
, and
nation building. He is one of the originators of
selectorate theory, and was also the director of
New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for
Political Economy from 2006 to 2016.
He was a founding partner at Mesquita & Roundell,
until that company merged with his other company, Selectors, LLC, that used the selectorate model for macro-level policy analysis. Now, the company is called Selectors, LLC and uses both the forecasting model and the selectorate approach in consulting.
Bueno de Mesquita is discussed in an August 16, 2009 Sunday ''
New York Times Magazine
''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors. ...
'' article entitled "Can
Game Theory
Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. Myerson, Roger B. (1991). ''Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict,'' Harvard University Press, p.&nbs1 Chapter-preview links, ppvii–xi It has appli ...
Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?"
In December 2008 he was also the subject of a
History Channel two-hour special entitled "The Next
Nostradamus" and has been featured on the 2021
Netflix series
How to Become a Tyrant
''How to Become a Tyrant'' is a Netflix docu-series, and narrated by Peter Dinklage.
Plot
The narrator states that everybody wants absolute power to transform society to their liking and proceeds to explain how such power can be obtained and sus ...
.
He is the author of many books, including ''
The Dictator's Handbook
''The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics'' is a 2011 non-fiction book by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, published by the company PublicAffairs. It discusses how politicians gain and retain politica ...
'', co-authored wit
Alastair Smith and the forthcoming boo
''The Invention of Power''(January 2022).
Work in Forecasting
Into the early 2000s, Bueno de Mesquita was known for his development of an expected utility model (EUM) capable of predicting the outcome of policy events over a unidimensional policy space.
His EUM used
Duncan Black's
median voter theorem to calculate the median voter position of an N-player bargaining game and solved for the median voter position as the outcome of several bargaining rounds using other ad-hoc components in the process.
The first implementation of the EUM was used to successfully predict the successor of Indian Prime Minister Y. B. Chavan after his government collapsed (this was additionally the first known time the model was tested). Bueno de Mesquita's model not only correctly predicted that Charan Singh would become prime minister (a prediction that few experts in Indian politics at the time predicted) but also that Y. B. Chavan would be in Singh's cabinet, that Indira Gandhi would briefly support Chavan's government, and that the government would soon collapse (all events that did occur). From the early success of his model, Bueno de Mesquita began a long and continuing career of consulting using refined implementations of his forecasting model. A declassified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency rated his model as being 90 percent accurate.
Since 2005 or so, Bueno de Mesquita developed a superior model, now known as the Predictioneer's Game or PG that forecasts in a multi-dimensional space, uses the Schofield mean voter theorem, and solves for
Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium
In game theory, a Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium (PBE) is an equilibrium concept relevant for dynamic games with incomplete information (sequential Bayesian games). It is a refinement of Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE). A perfect Bayesian equilibr ...
in an N-player bargaining game that includes the possibility of coercion, essentially a greatly generalized version of the 2-player game i
War and Reason This model predicts significantly more accurately and does a substantially better job of identifying opportunities that players have to improve the outcome by exploiting uncertainties. This model is documented in ''A New Model for Predicting Policy Choices: Preliminary Tests'', and discussed and applied to examples in ''The Predictioneer's Game''.
Bueno de Mesquita's forecasting model have greatly contributed to the study of political events using forecasting methods, especially through his numerous papers that document elements of his models and predictions.
Bueno de Mesquita has published dozens of forecasts in academic journals. The entirety of his models have never been released to the general public.
Publications
*
* ''Forecasting Political Events: The Future of Hong Kong'' (with David Newman and Alvin Rabushka). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
* ''Predicting Politics''. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002.
* (with Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, James D. Morrow)
* (with Kiron K. Skinner, Serhiy Kudelia, Condoleezza Rice)
*
*
*
Principles of International Politics
A principle is a proposition or value that is a guide for behavior or evaluation. In law, it is a rule that has to be or usually is to be followed. It can be desirably followed, or it can be an inevitable consequence of something, such as the la ...
. 2013.
*
*''
The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West''. PublicAffairs. 2022.
ISBN 9781541768758
Family
Bueno de Mesquita has three children and six grandchildren. His son, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, is a political scientist working at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
References
External links
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's under faculty at NYUTo See The Future, Use The Logic Of Self-Interest– ''
NPR'' audio clip
*
*
** (TED2009)
The New Nostradamus – on the use by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of rational choice theory in political forecasting
Example of Model Applied To Iran’s Nuclear Program
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce
Game theorists
Living people
1946 births
American political scientists
Queens College, City University of New York alumni
University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts alumni
Scientists from New York City
New York University faculty
American people of Portuguese-Jewish descent