Bruce J. Bueno de Mesquita

Bruce J. Bueno de Mesquita is the Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University, and a Senior Fellow Emeritus at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is also Director of NYU's Center for Conflict Resolution and Multilateral Cooperation. He is the co-founder of Selectors, LLC, a New York-based consulting firm which has advised the U.S. Government and Fortune 500 companies, among other clients. His uncannily accurate predictions about high-tension situations like those in Iran and Pakistan have gained him attention from the New York Times, The Economist and other media as well as from the National Academy of Science. His combination of wide-ranging expertise and high-power analytics allows him to make strikingly accurate predictions of world events and speak with authority on the power dynamics of everything from office politics to international summits. In 1999 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and in 2016 from the University of Haifa in Israel, as well as the DMZ Peace Prize in Korea. Bueno de Mesquita served as president of the International Studies Association in 2001-2002.

Bueno de Mesquita's research focuses on conflict resolution, complex negotiations, and the political, economy of development. He developed game theoretic models of international interactions, including being co-developer of the selectorate theory that has stimulated an extensive literature involving analytic and empirical refinements, and he developed broadly used indicators of governing coalition size, alliance reliability, policy preferences, leadership risk taking propensities, and power discounted for distance. His negotiation models are used by governments and corporations to help resolve complex disputes. His current research examines how political institutions shape domestic political instability as well as how the incentives induced by the Concordat of Worms (1122) altered the trajectories of secularization and economic growth differently in different parts of Europe.