Nothing New Here: Review of “The Predictioneer’s Game”
While reading The Predictioneer’s Game by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, I kept thinking that his theory of predicting people’s actions by their interest in an issue (salience) and their power to affect that issue (influence). I put the book down and checked my bookshelf. I then pulled out Everyman’s Prince: A Guide to Understanding Your Political Problems by William Coplin and Michael O’Leary which had a very similar method for predicting people’s actions by calculating each of the actors’ issue positions, salience, and power to arrive at the likely outcome of a conflict. The only real difference was that Mesquita dressed up his analysis with game theory.
It was Mesquita’s use of game theory that reminded me of a second book on my shelf: Steven Brams’ Theory of Moves. Brams extends upon classic game theory to demonstrate how people don’t just consider their next move in a game (or political situation) but also countermoves and moves that counter the countermoves. Players model their opponent’s thinking processes and consider the variables of salience and power to determine how the game will evolve. Brams also adds the dimension of information that is a vital factor in determining a sequence of moves.
I bring these two books up because, taken together, they are a much better and more informative read than The Predictioneer’s Game. Mesquita repeatedly trumpets his new findings and how he is a much sought-after consultant because his adroit use of game theory can predict the future. He gives a few past predictions that were successful and (in false humility) one that wasn’t successful (but only because he couldn’t foresee a key Senator’s affair). His first two chapters purport to be a tutorial on game theory but you would be better off reading The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist’s Guide to Success in Business and Life for a more accurate understanding of game theory. The rest of the book is a rambling digression of how his theory could have predicted historical events. Retrodiction is poor evidence.
It took a while but I finally determined that what Mesquita was actually doing was trying to marry game theory with economic man theory. Trying to analyze peoples’ actions based solely on rational actors coldly calculating their self-interest has been overturned by the latest theories in neuroscience and behavioral economics. Once I realized this, I was tempted to stop reading but I pressed on. I should have stopped. Applying behavioral economics with game theory would be a great advance forward for both fields. I hoped that this was Mesquita’s intent but what he really did was to try to revive a discredited theory (rational choice theory) with the revived interest in game theory. Not a rational choice or a good strategy in this case.
Tags: behavioral economics, game theory, rational choice theory