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A new specification of the expected utility model of international conflict places expected utilities within a polar coordinate system; treats third-party choices in a manner more consistent with classical forms; estimates the expected utilities derived from not challenging existing policies; more fully represents the expected costs of conflict; and normalizes expected utilities regardless of system size. By assuming that the probability of escalation of a dispute increases monotonically with leaders' expectations of gain, we derive continuous functions for the probabilities of war, intervention, violence, and peace. The revised theory significantly improves our ability to discriminate between violent and nonviolent disputes and between violent disputes that escalated to warfare and those that did not in Europe between 1816 and 1970.

When bad economics is good politics / Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton L. Root -- Order, disorder, and economic change: Latin America versus North America / Douglass C. North, William Summerhill, and Barry R. Weingast -- Political institutions, political survival, and policy success / Bruce Bueno de Mesquita ... [et al.] -- The compulsion of patronage: political sources of information asymmetry and risk in developing country economies / Hilton L. Root and Nahalel Nellis -- Industrial prosperity under political instability: an analysis of revolutionary Mexico / Stephen Haber and Armando Razo -- Socio-political instability and the problem of development / Paul J. Zak -- Political institutions, economic growth, and democratic evolution: the Pacific Asian scenario / Yi Feng ... [et al.] -- Democracy and the rule of law / Robert Barro -- Improving the effectiveness of donor-assisted development / Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton L. Root

▪ Abstract  The Rochester school of political science, led by William H Riker, pioneered the new method of positive political theory. Positive political theory, or rational choice theory, represents the attempt to build formal models of collective decision-making processes, often relying on the assumption of self-interested rational action. This method has been used to study such political processes as elections, legislative behavior, public goods, and treaty formation and diplomatic strategy in international relations. In this article, we provide a retrospective account of the Rochester school, which discusses Riker's theoretical synthesis and his institution building in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We discuss some of the most important Rochester school contributions related to spatial models of voting, agenda setting, structure-induced equilibria, heresthetics, game theory, and political theory. We also briefly situate positive political theory within the larger context of political science and economics.