Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in international relations, foreign policy, and nation building. He is also one of the authors of the selectorate theory. He is also the director of New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy.

He has founded a company, Mesquita & Roundell, that specializes in making political and foreign-policy forecasts using a computer model based on game theory and rational choice theory.

He was featured as the primary subject in the documentary on the History Channel in December 2008. The show, titled Next Nostradamus, details how the scientist is using computer algorithms to predict future world events.

[edit] Criticism

In 1994, Donald Green and Ian Shapiro of Yale University published Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory which criticized the methodologies and predictive accuracy of rational choice theory. ^[1]

In 1999, the journal International Security published an article by Stephen M. Malt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government which claimed that rational choice theory was not useful in prediction or policy formulation. ^[1]

Bueno de Mesquita and colleagues responded to these accusations by claiming that the criticisms lacked logic in the same way as the research of political scientists who denounce modelling. ^[1]

[edit] Publications

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (1981). The War Trap. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 226. ISBN 0-300-03091-6.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita; Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, James D. Morrow (2003). The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge: MIT Press. pp. 480. ISBN 0-262-52440-6.