Michael Taylor (born 1942), is a political theorist and political economist who currently teaches at the University of Washington. His research interests include rational choice theory, moral motivation and game theory.
Game theory was applied in social sciences before Taylor's work, which propose a theory for a rationally motivated cooperation, that is, cooperation that maximizes utility. Taylor explains the game of chicken, in which cooperation is a Nash equilibrium, and notes that it is often mistaken for a prisoners dilemma, in which cooperation is dominated by selfish strategies. Following analyses by the mathematician Stephen Smale and experiments by the political scientist Daniel Axelrod, Taylor has argued that spontanteous cooperation emerges in repeated prisoners' dilemmas.
He is the author of Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge, 1982), The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge, 1987), Rationality and Revolution, (co-author and editor, Cambridge, 1988) and Rationality and the ideology of disconnection (Cambridge, 2006).