Bruce Bueno de Mesquita wants you to buy his book. He wants royalties and he wants fame. He wants the book to promote his consulting business. The text may well be full of self-promotional tall tales and calumny — unless the author calculated that the costs of dishonesty (potential intellectual disrepute) outweighed the benefits (more fame, royalties and consulting). When he walks into bookstores, he probably moves his book from the back shelves to the front. If he knew I was writing this review, he’d think about crafty ways to manipulate me.

Or, at the least, he wants you to believe all this.

Bueno de Mesquita is the author of a fascinating new book called “The Predictioneer’s Game,” describing his efforts to use game theory to model human behavior, divine the future and improve incentive systems. It’s a rollicking book — a somewhat more technical and thesis-driven cousin to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s “Freakonomics.” And it’s based on the premise that people are selfish. They do what’s best for them. “Game theory,” Bueno de Mesquita writes, “urges us to take a cold, hard look at what it means to be a calculating, rational decision maker.”

And he lives up to his word. Mother Teresa did nice things, sure. But she was awfully public about those good deeds, and she appears to have been seeking fame and reward, either in this life or the next. “Could it be that Mother Teresa’s ambition for herself was tied to her faith in an eternal reward?” Bueno de Mesquita writes. “It makes sense to pay the price of sacrifice for the short, finite time of a life span if the consequence is a reward that goes on for infinity in heaven. In fact, isn’t that exactly the explanation many of us give for the actions of suicide bombers, dying in their own prideful eyes as martyrs who will be rewarded for all eternity in heaven?”

Yes, you read that correctly. On Page 15 of “The Predictioneer’s Game,” Bueno de Mesquita equates Mother Teresa with the likes of Mohamed Atta.