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A well kept book which for every educated person is a ‘must’ read. 

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita can predict the future. He is a master of game theory, a rather fancy name for a simple idea: when people compete with each other they always do what they think is in their own best interest. Bueno de Mesquita uses game theory to foretell – and even engineer – political, financial and personal events. In fact, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts, for everyone from the CIA to major companies, have an astonishing ninety per cent success rate. In this startling and revelatory book he describes his methods and allows us to play along.

Bueno de Mesquita explores the origins of game theory as formulated by John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winner who became the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind. He has developed Nash’s ideas to create a rigorous and pragmatic system of calculation that enables us to think strategically about what our opponents want, how much they want it, and how they might react to our every move.

Bueno de Mesquita applies his methods to many of the most pressing issues of our day. He advises how best to contain the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. He shows how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be resolved. He explains how corporate fraud can be anticipated and prevented. He addresses climate change and international terrorism: their likely evolution and our most effective response.

But, as Bueno de Mesquita makes clear, game theory isn’t just for saving the world. It can also help in your own life – to succeed in a legal dispute, to advance your career or that of a colleague, and even to buy a car at the lowest possible price.

Shrewd, provocative and original, Predictioneer will change your understanding of the world – both now and in the future. If life’s a game, then Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is the one essential member of your team.

Reviews:

• • Fruitful reading that will make it difficult to look at the world through quite the same eyes as in one’s virginal, pre-game theory days, Kirkus Reviews

• Organized thought applied to problems can illuminate and help solve them. This easy and enjoyable read is, in many ways, a how-to book for that very purpose — George P. Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State

• Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has demonstrated the power of using game theory and related assumptions of rational and self-seeking behavior in predicting the outcome of important political and legal processes. No one will fail to appreciate and learn from this well-written and always interesting account of his procedures — Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
• Predictioneer teaches us that we can predict how a conflict may be resolved if we carefully consider the incentives for all parties in the conflict. In an extraordinary range of applications, from ancient history to tomorrow’s headlines, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita demonstrates the power of the game-theoretic approach — Roger B. Myerson, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Professor, University of Chicago
• A fascinating new book — Daniel Finkelstein, Times

About the Author: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A specialist in policy forecasting, political economy and international security policy, he received his doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan. Bueno de Mesquita is the author of fourteen books and numerous articles for journals, newspapers and magazines. He is a partner in a consulting firm focused on government and business applications of his game theory models. He lives in San Francisco and New York City.

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

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, and discussed and applied to examples in The Predictioneer’s Game.

Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasting models 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. Bueno de Mesquita has published dozens of forecasts in academic journals. The entirety of his models have never been released to the general public.