Jeffrey S. Banks Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Jeffrey Scot Banks (1958–2000) was a scholar who made wide-ranging contributions to economics and political science. He received his BA in political science from the University of California Los Angeles in 1982 and his PhD in social science from the California Institute of Technology in 1986. Banks began his career at the University of Rochester and was promoted to full professor of economics and political science in just five years. He left Rochester in 1997 to join the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where he remained until his death due to complications from the treatment of leukemia. Banks’ productivity as an academic was prodigious: At the time of his death, he had published forty-three articles and two books—with an additional book and eight additional articles published posthumously.

Banks’ work had an impact in a large number of fields, including game theory, social choice theory, economic theory, international relations, experimental economics, and political economy. In game theory, his work with Joel Sobel produced the concept of divine equilibrium, used to sharpen theoretical predictions in mathematical models of strategic interaction. In social choice, Banks characterized the outcomes possible as a result of varying the order in which bills are considered (this is now known as the “Banks set”); he contributed to the understanding of the conditions under which majority voting leads to stable outcomes; and with David Austen-Smith, he authored a two-volume book that has provided students and researchers with much-improved access to the cutting edge of the field. In economic theory, his work with Rangarajan Sundaram expanded our knowledge of optimal decision rules when faced with a set of choices with uncertain outcomes. In international relations, Banks established general results on the probability of war, importing the techniques from the literature on mechanism design in economics. In experimental economics, Banks and coauthors John Ledyard and David Porter analyzed the performance of markets in the face of uncertain demand or supply. Perhaps the largest impact of Banks’ work was in the field of political economy. With David Austen Smith, Banks made seminal contributions to our understanding of elections and government formation in parliamentary systems and of the effect of strategic voting on the probability that majority voting leads to the “correct” outcome. With John Duggan, Banks established foundational results for general legislative bargaining games. On the topic of elections, Banks (by himself and with various coauthors) elucidated the effect of small costs due to deviations from campaign platforms, the impact of uncertainty about voting behavior on candidate positions, and the influence of future elections on political outcomes in the present.

Bibliography:

Austen-Smith, David, and Jeffrey S. Banks. “Elections, Coalitions, and Legislative Outcomes.” American Political Science Review 82 (1988): 405–422.
“Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem.” American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 34–45.
Positive Political Theory I: Collective Preference. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Positive Political Theory II: Strategy and Structure. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Banks, Jeffrey S. “Sophisticated Voting Outcomes and Agenda Control.” Social Choice and Welfare 1 (1985): 295–306.
“Equilibrium Behavior in Crisis Bargaining Games.” American Journal of Political Science 34 (1990): 599–614.
“Singularity Theory and Core Existence in the Spatial Model.” Journal of Mathematical Economics 24 (1995): 523–536.
Banks, Jeffrey S., and John Duggan. “A Bargaining Model of Collective Choice.” American Political Science Review 94 (2000): 733–788.
Banks, Jeffrey S., John O. Ledyard, and David P. Porter. “Allocating Uncertain and Unresponsive Resources: An Experimental Approach.” Rand Journal of Economics 20 (1989): 1–25.
Banks, Jeffrey S., and Joel Sobel. “Equilibrium Selection in Signaling Games.” Econometrica 55 (1987): 647–661.
Banks, Jeffrey S., and Rangarajan K. Sundaram. “Denumerable-armed Bandits.” Econometrica 60 (1992): 1071–1096.