Bruce Bueno de Mesquita | |
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| Born | (1946-11-24)November 24, 1946 (age 78) |
| Citizenship | American |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Queens College, New York 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 (/məˈskiːtə/; born November 24, 1946) is apolitical scientist, professor atNew York University, and senior fellow atStanford University'sHoover Institution.
Bueno de Mesquita graduated fromStuyvesant High School in 1963,[citation needed] (along withRichard Axel andAlexander Rosenberg), earned his BA degree fromQueens College, New York in 1967, and then his MA and PhD from theUniversity of Michigan. He specializes ininternational relations,foreign policy, andnation building. He is one of the originators ofselectorate theory, and was also the director ofNew York University's Alexander Hamilton Center forPolitical Economy from 2006 to 2016.[1]
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 SundayNew York Times Magazine article entitled "CanGame Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?"[3] In December 2008 he was also the subject of aHistory Channel two-hour special entitled "The NextNostradamus" and has been featured on the 2021Netflix seriesHow to Become a Tyrant.
He is the author of many books, includingThe Dictator's Handbook, co-authored with Alastair Smith,[4] and the bookThe Invention of Power (January 2022).[5]
Into the early 2000s, Bueno de Mesquita was known for his development of anexpected utility model (EUM), an operationalized application of the expected utility hypothesis frommathematical economics. The model has been successful in predicting the outcome of many political events over a unidimensional policy space.[6] His EUM usedDuncan Black'smedian 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.[7]
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 forPerfect Bayesian Equilibrium in an N-player bargaining game that includes the possibility of coercion, essentially a greatly generalized version of the two-player game inWar and Reason.[8] 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. The model is documented inA New Model for Predicting Policy Choices: Preliminary Tests,[9] and discussed and applied to examples inThe Predictioneer's Game.[10]
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.[11][12][13][6][14][15][16] Bueno de Mesquita has published dozens of forecasts in academic journals. The entirety of his models have never been released to the general public.
Bueno de Mesquita has three children and six grandchildren. His son, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, is a political scientist currently serving as dean of theHarris School of Public Policy at theUniversity of Chicago.
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