Bueno de Mesquita graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1963,[citation needed] (along with Richard Axel and Alexander Rosenberg), earned his BA degree from Queens College, New York in 1967, and then his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan.

Bueno de Mesquita is discussed in an August 16, 2009 Sunday New York Times Magazine article entitled "Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?

"[3] In December 2008 he was also the subject of a History Channel two-hour special entitled "The Next Nostradamus" and has been featured on the 2021 Netflix series How to Become a Tyrant.

[8] This model predicts significantly more accurately and does a substantially better job of identifying opportunities that players have to improve the outcome by exploiting uncertainties.

His son, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, is a political scientist currently serving as dean of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.