Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita | |
---|---|
Born | November 24, 1946 |
Citizenship | American |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Michigan |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Political science |
Institutions | New York University, Hoover Institution |
Notable ideas | Selectorate theory |
Website | https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita.html |
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (
Biography
Bueno de Mesquita graduated from
He was a founding partner at Mesquita & Roundell,[2] 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
He is the author of many books, including The Dictator's Handbook, co-authored with Alastair Smith, and the book 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.[4] 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.[5]
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 an N-player bargaining game that includes the possibility of coercion, essentially a greatly generalized version of the 2-player game in 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,[6] and discussed and applied to examples in The Predictioneer's Game.[7]
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.[8][9][10][4][11][12][13] 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
- The War Trap. New Haven: ISBN 0-300-03091-6.
- Forecasting Political Events: The Future of Hong Kong (with David Newman and Alvin Rabushka). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. OCLC 11970890
- War and Reason (with David Lalman). Yale University Press, 1994. ISBN 9780300059229
- Predicting Politics. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002. OCLC 804351067
- ISBN 0-262-52440-6. (with Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, James D. Morrow)
- The Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin. Ann Arbor: ISBN 978-0-472-03319-5. Archived from the originalon September 14, 2012. Retrieved November 9, 2009. (with Kiron K. Skinner, Serhiy Kudelia, Condoleezza Rice)
- Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce (2009). The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future. OCLC 290470064.
- OCLC 701015473.
- Principles of International Politics. 2013.
- ISBN 9781610396622.
- 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
- ^ https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/viewCV?facultyId=86047&name=Bruce_Bueno%20De%20Mesquita [bare URL PDF]
- ^ Rehmeyer, Julie. "Mathematical Fortune-Telling". ScienceNews. Archived from the original on October 1, 2012. Retrieved May 12, 2011.
- ^ Thompson, Clive (August 12, 2009). "Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?". New York Times. Retrieved May 12, 2011.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8142-0898-4.
- ^ Mesquita, Bruce Bueno de. "Recipe for Failure". Foreign Policy. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
- S2CID 220784946.
- ^ Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce (2009). The Predictioneer's Game. Random House.
- S2CID 144560785.
- S2CID 254724334.
- S2CID 251092446.
- S2CID 154524531.
- JSTOR 24590817.
- S2CID 154524531.
External links
- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's under faculty at NYU
- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's biography at Hoover Archived September 16, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
- To See The Future, Use The Logic Of Self-Interest – NPR audio clip
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita at TED
- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predicts Iran's future, a TED talk (TED2009)
- The New Nostradamus Archived September 30, 2015, at the Wayback Machine – on the use by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of rational choice theory in political forecasting
- Example of Model Applied To Iran’s Nuclear Program Archived October 11, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
- Library of Economics and Liberty.
- Compilation of criticisms of Bueno de Mesquita's models