Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (/məˈskiːtə/; born November 24, 1946) is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Born (1946-11-24) November 24, 1946
CitizenshipAmerican
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Michigan
Academic work
DisciplinePolitical science
InstitutionsNew York University, Hoover Institution
Notable ideasSelectorate theory
Websitehttps://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita.html

Biography

Bueno de Mesquita graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1963, 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, 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.[1]

He has founded a company, Mesquita & Roundell,[2] that specializes in making political and foreign-policy forecasts. Bueno de Mesquita is discussed in an August 16, 2009 Sunday New York Times Magazine article entitled "Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?"[3] In December 2008 he was also the subject of a History Channel two-hour special entitled "The Next Nostradamus".

He was banned from entering Tanzania, following an argument with the leader about foreign policy.

Work in Forecasting

Bueno de Mesquita is know 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 uses Duncan Black's median voter theorem to calculate the median voter position of an N-player bargaining game and solves 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]

Bueno de Mesquita's expected utility model has greatly contributed to the study of political events using forecasting models, despite the entirety of the model having never been released to the general public.

Publications
  • The War Trap. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1981. p. 226. 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. ISBN 9780300042795 OCLC 11970890
  • Predicting Politics. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002. ISBN 9780814259849 OCLC 804351067
  • The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2003. p. 480. 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: University of Michigan Press. 2007. p. 356. ISBN 978-0-472-03319-5. (with Kiron K. Skinner, Serhiy Kudelia, Condoleezza Rice)
  • The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future. Random House. 2009. pp. 272. ISBN 1-4000-6787-1. OCLC 290470064.
  • The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. Random House. 2011. p. 272. ISBN 9781610390446. OCLC 701015473.
  • Principles of International Politics. 2013.
  • The Spoils of War: Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents". PublicAffairs. 2016. p. 291. ISBN 9781610396622.

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
  1. https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/viewCV?facultyId=86047&name=Bruce_Bueno%20De%20Mesquita
  2. Rehmeyer, Julie. "Mathematical Fortune-Telling". ScienceNews. Retrieved May 12, 2011.
  3. Thompson, Clive (August 12, 2009). "Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?". New York Times. Retrieved May 12, 2011.
  4. Mesquita, Bruce Bueno de (2002). Predicting Politics. Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8142-0898-4.
  5. Mesquita, Bruce Bueno de. "Recipe for Failure". Foreign Policy. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
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