Inside Man presents readers with an exercise in modeling human ways of being—thinking, feeling, acting. This book does not merely introduce models, but also attempts to teach modeling and to produce, within the reader, the predispositions and attitudes of the modeler: a distance from the individual whose behavior is modeled, an engineering approach to the model-building process, a (self)-critical approach to the model testing and elaboration process, and a pedagogical and a therapeutic approach to enacting and communicating models. Author Mihnea C. Moldoveanu makes the process and the phenomenon of modeling transparent and explicit, and clarifies the reasons for which modeling human behavior has to be an interactive process between the modeler and the modeled. This perspective situates Inside Man at the intersection of analytical and computational thinking about rationality, reasoning, choice and thinking, and the tradition of action science and action research.
"Inside Man is a fascinating and highly original treatise on the idea of understanding complex systems by interacting with them. It offers not only a new way of understanding complex systems that understand you back (such as human beings) but also an outline of a methodology for doing so. Experienced, real-world modelers will find much which resonates in terms of the limits of 'scientific' arms-length modeling, and an inspiring and thought provoking alternative, which will have profound practical implications for their art."—Martin Reeves, Senior Partner and Director, BCG Strategy Institute
"Mihnea Moldoveanu's new book, Inside Man, stands out as an intellectual tour de force. For social scientists—from hard-core game theorists to soft-core behavioralists and to those in-between—who seek to model human action, Moldoveanu's deep, systematically developed insights and practical advice should prove invaluable. By complementing the familiar descriptive, prescriptive, and normative categories, Inside Man's development of 'ascriptive' science, if heeded by practitioners, should elevate the art and science of formal modeling."—James K. Sebenius, Harvard Business School and author of 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals
"Traditionally, the business-school classroom has promoted the virtues of action. This book promotes the virtues of thinking—even of thinking about how we think. Read this book, think, and, only then, act!"—Adam Brandenburger, Stern School of Business, New York University and author of Co-opetition
