Professor Jeffrey W. Knopf, chair of the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies degree program at the Middlebury Institute, co-edited Behavioral Economics and Nuclear Weapons, a new collection of essays examining how insights about decision making from behavioral economics can inform nuclear policy.
Knopf co-edited the book with Anne I. Harrington, a lecturer in international relations at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University. She is also a former post-doctoral fellow at the Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
The volume explores behavioral economics, which has drawn on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and other fields to develop a critique of standard models of rationality in mainstream economics and to show how human decision making often deviates in systematic ways from the predictions of rational actor models.
Harrington and Knopf invited an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the implications of these findings that inform behavioral economics for issues related to nuclear weapons policies.
Chapters in the book explore several topics, from deterrence and the nuclear nonproliferation regime to how people evaluate prospective technologies for ballistic missile defense
Eva Gudbergsdottir
evag@middlebury.edu
831-647-6606
Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies (NPTS) Program Chair Jeffrey Knopf publishes article in Contemporary Security Policy. The article is part of a special issue on Nuclear Norms in Global Governance. This special issue was co-edited by NPTS professor Avner Cohen and Maria Rost Rublee from Monash University in Australia.
