He is a political scientist at NYU who uses spreadsheets to predict how conflicts will be resolved. He consults for the CIA, earns $50,000 per prediction, and uses his brand of game theory to offer wisdom on questions like “How fully will France participate in the Strategic Defense Initiative?” and “What policy will Beijing adopt toward Taiwan’s role in the Asian Development Bank?”
To predict how leaders will behave in a conflict, Bueno de Mesquita starts with a specific prediction he wants to make, then interviews four or five experts who know the situation well. He identifies the stakeholders who will exert pressure on the outcome (typically 20 or 30 players) and gets the experts to assign values to the stakeholders in four categories: What outcome do the players want? How hard will they work to get it? How much clout can they exert on others? How firm is their resolve? Each value is expressed as a number on its own arbitrary scale, like 0 to 200. (Sometimes Bueno de Mesquita skips the experts, simply reads newspaper and journal articles and generates his own list of players and numbers.) For example, in the case of Iran’s bomb, Bueno de Mesquita set Ahmadinejad’s preferred outcome at 180 and, on a scale of 0 to 100, his desire to get it at 90, his power at 5 and his resolve at 90.
His model is a secret but it seems to be some kind of dynamic coalition formation model. He has predicted that Iran will not obtain a nuclear weapon owing to the rising power of dissident coalitions. In August,
He spent that morning looking over his Iranian data, and he generated a new chart predicting how the dissidents’ power would grow over the next few months. In terms of power, one category — students — would surpass Ahmadinejad during the summer, and by September or October their clout would rival that of Khamenei, the supreme leader. “And that’s huge!” Bueno de Mesquita said excitedly. “If that’s right, it’s huge!” He said he believed that Iran’s domestic politics would remain quiet over the summer, then he thought they’d “really perk up again” by the fall.
A long profile appeared in The New York Times Magazine.
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November 6, 2009 at 8:10 am
It's Not the Heat, It's the Humidity
I was wondering, does anyone take non-economist “game theorists” seriously? Clearly some do, as evidenced by Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel. But can one really claim to study game theory without rigorous mathematical training?
November 6, 2009 at 9:29 am
RC
What makes you think Bueno de Mesquita — as many others — does not have rigorous mathematical training?
November 6, 2009 at 9:54 am
It's Not the Heat, It's the Humidity
There is no formal math in his papers and books. There is very little formal math in poli sci grad school. I.e., do students take real analysis or differential equations, or any other proof-based math class?
That said, there are some poli sci people who do highly technical work that gets published in JET, GEB, etc. But they are few and far between. What passes for game theory in some pol sci depts is merely two by two matrices illustrating the prisoner’s dilemma..
None of this is necessarily bad. Quite the contrary — it’s wonderful that people outside of the field are interested in it. Indeed, their work may provide inspiration for the technical economist. But it should give the non-experts pause when they expound their findings to the NYT.
November 6, 2009 at 4:58 pm
billpetti
Many programs in poli sci are very heavy in terms of formal mathematical training. And BDM, as well as others, utilizes formal math in their peer reviewed work.
November 7, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Anonymous 2
Is there any reason to think that the challenges in predicting Iran’s future lie in the lack of sophisticated mathematical training outside of economics graduate school?
November 7, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Libfree
Does his prediction possibly change the outcome?