UNRAVELLING BUENO DE MESQUITA’S GROUP DECISION MODEL

Jason B. Scholz, Gregory J. Calbert, Glen A. Smith

2011

Abstract

The development of societies of human and machine agents should benefit from an understanding of human group decision processes. Political Scientist and Professor, Bruce Bueno De Mesquita has made significant claims for the predictive accuracy of his computational model of group decision making, receiving much popular press including newspaper articles, books and a television documentary entitled “The New Nostradamus”. Despite these and many journal and conference publications related to the topic, no clear elicitation of the model exists in the open literature. We expose and present the model by careful navigation of the literature and illustrate the soundness of our interpretation by replicating De Mesquita’s own results. We also discuss concerns regarding model sensitivity and convergence.

References

  1. Black, D. (1948). On the Rationale of Group Decisionmaking. Political Economy 56, No 1, Feb: 23-34.
  2. Congleton, R. D. (2003). The Median Voter Model. The Encyclopedia of Public Choice. Kluwer Academic Press: 382-386.
  3. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (1980). An Expected Utility Theory of International Conflict. The American Political Science Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec), pp. 917-931.
  4. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (1981). The War Trap. Yale, CT: Yale University Press.
  5. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (1984). Forecasting Policy Decisions: An Expected Utility Approach to PostKhomeini Iran, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 226-236.
  6. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (1985). The War Trap Revisited: A Revised Expected Utility Model. American Political Science Review 79, No 1, 156-177.
  7. Bueno De Mesquita, B.B. and Lalman, D. (1986). Reason and War, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4, (Dec), pp. 1113-1129.
  8. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (1994). Political Forecasting: An Expected Utility Method, European Community Decision Making, Yale University Press, Stockman, F. (ed.), Chapter 4, pp 71-104.
  9. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (1997). A Decision Making Model: Its Structure and Form. International Interactions 23: No 3-4 235-266.
  10. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (2002). Predicting Politics, Ohio State University Press.
  11. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (2009a). A New Model for Predicting Policy Choices: Preliminary Tests, 50th Meeting of the International Studies Association, New York, Feb 15-18.
  12. Bueno De Mesquita, B. B. (2009b). The Predictioneer's Game (1st ed.). New York: Random House.
  13. Kollman, K, Miller, J. H. and Page, S.E. eds (2010) Computational models in political economy. MIT Press.
  14. 11. Determine new position decisions x, based on rules in section 5 for octant of Eij(i) vs Eji(j).
  15. 12. Increment the rounds, t=t+1 13. If t=? then stop.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Scholz J., Calbert G. and Smith G. (2011). UNRAVELLING BUENO DE MESQUITA’S GROUP DECISION MODEL . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-8425-40-9, pages 18-30. DOI: 10.5220/0003121500180030


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart11,
author={Jason B. Scholz and Gregory J. Calbert and Glen A. Smith},
title={UNRAVELLING BUENO DE MESQUITA’S GROUP DECISION MODEL },
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2011},
pages={18-30},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003121500180030},
isbn={978-989-8425-40-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - UNRAVELLING BUENO DE MESQUITA’S GROUP DECISION MODEL
SN - 978-989-8425-40-9
AU - Scholz J.
AU - Calbert G.
AU - Smith G.
PY - 2011
SP - 18
EP - 30
DO - 10.5220/0003121500180030