Meirowitz named Damon Wells Professor of Political Science
Adam Meirowitz, a renowned political economist whose theoretical approaches have advanced the study of international relations in the area of strategy and conflict as well as our understanding of domestic political institutions, has been appointed the Damon Wells Professor of Political Science.
He is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Political Science with a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics.
Meirowitz, who is recognized as one of the best formal theorists of his generation, joined the Yale faculty on July 1, 2022 after previously holding named professorships at the University of Utah and Princeton University. He is an expert on the use and misuse of information in strategic situations, and his research focuses on the application of game theory to the study of governance, collective decision-making and military conflict. Over the course of his career, he has made substantial contributions across several important subfields in political science: his research examines bureaucratic delegation, information aggregation in voting, and mediation of conflict between countries, and has shaped the subfields of international relations, American politics, and comparative politics. Moreover, his methodological approaches are a model for scholars in the field.
He is a leading innovator in the use of game theory to understand organizations, governance, electoral politics, and choice-making, and his work as a formal theorist has made a substantive impact in the area of political economy. In 2012, he was awarded the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, which is awarded every two years to the best scholar under the age of 40 working in the field of social choice theory or welfare economics.
Meirowitz’s scholarship has been supported by funds from the National Science Foundation and his published work covers topics as diverse as arms sales and conflict, shareholder voting, political lobbying, the role of money and parties in politics, deliberation, delegation, learning in evolution and ecological systems, strategic voting in Congress and the existence of equilibria in certain types of large games. His paper, “Spatial Models of Delegation” (coauthored with Jonathan Bendor) received the 2005 Heinz Eulau Award for the best paper published in the American Political Science Review. He is the coauthor (with Nolan McCarty) of the field-defining book “Political Game Theory,” and his scholarship has been published in the American Political Science Review, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Financial Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as top theory journals.
He has been an outstanding academic citizen at his previous institutions and will doubtless make important contributions to intellectual community at Yale. Already, he is a member of advisory committee for the Institution for Social and Policy Studies program on Democratic Innovations. At Princeton he directed the Quantitative and Analytical Political Science Program, fostering strong intellectual communities in both units.
Meirowitz’s teaching has included graduate and undergraduate courses in game theory, formal analysis, mathematical modeling, and non-market strategy. He is a sought-after mentor whose advisees regularly obtain positions in top Political Science departments and has received awards for graduate teaching from his previous institutions. At Princeton, he played an instrumental role in incorporating formal methods training into the graduate curriculum. These efforts supported graduate students across Political Science subfields.
Meirowitz earned his Ph.D. at Stanford and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester.
