Michael Taylor (political scientist)
Michael Taylor (born 1942) is a political theorist and political economist, who is currently a professor at the University of Washington. His research interests include rational choice theory, moral motivation and game theory.
Taylor completed his PhD at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. He has taught at Essex and at Yale University and was previously Visiting Professor or Fellow has held visiting positions at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the European University Institute in Florence, and at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Game theory was applied in social sciences before Taylor's work, which propose a theory for a rationally motivated cooperation, that is, cooperation that maximizes utility. Taylor explains the game of chicken, in which cooperation is a Nash equilibrium, and notes that it is often mistaken for a prisoners dilemma, in which cooperation is dominated by selfish strategies. Following analyses by the mathematician Stephen Smale and experiments by the political scientist Robert Axelrod, Taylor has argued that spontanteous cooperation emerges in repeated prisoners' dilemmas.
Published works
He is the author of Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge, 1982), The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge, 1987), Rationality and Revolution, (co-author and editor, Cambridge, 1988) and Rationality and the ideology of disconnection (Cambridge, 2006).
