Luis Fernando Medina

Luis Fernando Medina (Ph.D Stanford) specializes in formal approaches to comparative politics. He has just finished a book "A Theory of Collective Action and Social Change" (University of Michigan Press) that develops a method to study games with multiple equilibria (of which collective action problems are a special case) and applies it to the study of politico-economic problems, especially clientelism and wage-bargaining. A preliminary presentation of the method was published in "Rationality and Society" (2006).

Currently he is engaged in a second project that extends the method of stability sets to the study of electoral games. For this project, he was recently awarded a Fellowship from the Bankard Fund in Political Economy.

He teaches courses on game theory, on Latin America and on the connections between rational-choice theory and other traditions (especially social theory). He is also currently responsible for the Core Seminar in Comparative Politics.

He has also written on the game-theoretic analysis of elections, extending results of the theory of spatial competition to the case of multi-district elections. The results of this work were published as a piece in the "British Journal of Political Science" (2006).

A citizen of Colombia, where he received his B.A degrees in Economics and Philosophy, he maintains ties in his native country, especially as co-director of the Center for Research in Political Economy at the Universidad Externado de Colombia.