Prediction: How to See and Shape the Future with Game Theory

by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

The data on stakeholder positions were based on a measure of the degree to which each country in the world as of 1948 shared security interests with the United States or the Soviet Union. The procedure I used to evaluate shared interests was based on a method I developed in publications in the mid-1970s.2 The procedure looks at how similar each pair of countries’ military alliance portfolios are to each other from year to year. Those who tended to ally with the same states in the same way were taken to share security concerns, and those who allied in significantly different ways (as the United States and the Soviet Union did) were taken to have different, perhaps opposed, security policies and interests.