Herbert Simon’s renowned theory of bounded rationality is principally interested in cognitive constraints and environmental factors and influences which prevent people from thinking or behaving according to formal rationality. Simon’s theory has been expanded in numerous directions and taken up by various disciplines with an interest in how humans think and behave. This includes philosophy, psychology, neurocognitive sciences, economics, political science, sociology, management, and organization studies.
The Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality draws together an international team of leading experts to survey the recent literature and the latest developments in these related fields. The chapters feature entries on key behavioural phenomena, including reasoning, judgement, decision making, uncertainty, risk, heuristics and biases, and fast and frugal heuristics. The text also examines current ideas such as fast and slow thinking, nudge, ecological rationality, evolutionary psychology, embodied cognition, and neurophilosophy. Overall, the volume serves to provide the most complete state-of-the-art collection on bounded rationality available.
This book is essential reading for students and scholars of economics, psychology, neurocognitive sciences, political sciences, and philosophy.
1 Why bounded rationality?
Riccardo Viale
2 What is bounded rationality?
Gerd Gigerenzer
PART I Naturalizing bounded rationality
3 Towards a critical naturalism about bounded rationality
Thomas Sturm
4 Bounded rationality: the two cultures
Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos
5 Seeking rationality: $500 bills and perceptual obviousness
Teppo Felin and Mia Felin
6 Bounded rationality, distributed cognition, and the computational modeling of complex systems
Miles MacLeod and Nancy J. Nersessian
7 Bounded rationality and problem solving: the interpretative function of thought
Laura Macchi and Maria Bagassi
8 Simon’s legacies for mathematics educators
Laura Martignon, Kathryn Laskey, and Keith Stenning
9 Bounded knowledge
Cristina Bicchieri and Giacomo Sillari
PART II Cognitive misery and mental dualism
10 Bounded rationality, reasoning and dual processing
Jonathan St. B. T. Evans
11 Why humans are cognitive misers and what it means for the Great Rationality Debate
Keith E. Stanovich
12 Bounded rationality and dual systems
Samuel C. Bellini-Leite and Keith Frankish
13 Models and rational deductions
Phil N. Johnson-Laird
14 Patterns of defeasible inference in causal diagnostic judgment
Jean Baratgin and Jean-Louis Stilgenbauer
15 Attribute-based choice
Francine W. Goh and Jeffrey R. Stevens
PART III Occam’s razor: mental monism and ecological rationality
16 Bounded reason in a social world
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
17 Rationality without optimality: bounded and ecological rationality from a Marrian perspective
Henry Brighton
18 The winds of change: the Sioux, Silicon Valley, society, and simple heuristics
Julian N. Marewski and Ulrich Hoffrage
19 Ecological rationality: bounded rationality in an evolutionary light
Samuel A. Nordli and Peter M. Todd
20 Mapping heuristics and prospect theory: a study of theory integration
Thorsten Pachur
21 Bounded rationality for artificial intelligence
Özgür Şimşek
22 Psychopathological irrationality and bounded rationality: why is autism economically rational?
Riccardo Viale
PART IV Embodied bounded rationality
23 Embodied bounded rationality
Vittorio Gallese, Antonio Mastrogiorgio, Enrico Petracca, and Riccardo Viale
24 Extending the bounded rationality framework: bounded-resource models in biology
Christopher Cherniak
25 How rationality is bounded by the brain
Paul Thagard
26 Building a new rationality from the new cognitive neuroscience
Colin H. McCubbins, Mathew D. McCubbins, and Mark Turner
PART V Homo Oeconomicus Bundatus
27 Modeling bounded rationality in economic theory: four examples
Ariel Rubinstein
28 Bounded rationality, satisficing and the evolution of economic thought: diverse concepts
Clement A. Tisdell
29 Beyond economists’ armchairs: the rise of procedural economics
Shabnam Mousavi and Nicolaus Tideman
30 Bounded rationality and expectations in economics
Ignazio Visco and Giordano Zevi
31 Less is more for Bayesians, too
Gregory Wheeler
32 Bounded rationality as the cognitive basis for evolutionary economics
Richard R. Nelson
33 Beyond "bounded rationality": behaviours and learning in complex evolving worlds
Giovanni Dosi, Marco Faillo, and Luigi Marengo
PART VI Cognitive organization
34 Bounded rationality and organizational decision making
Massimo Egidi and Giacomo Sillari
35 Attention and organizations
Inga Jonaityte and Massimo Warglien
36 The bounded rationality of groups and teams
Torsten Reimer, Hayden Barber, and Kirstin Dolick
37 Cognitive biases and debiasing in intelligence analysis
Ian K. Belton and Mandeep K. Dhami
PART VII Behavioral public policies: nudging and boosting
38 "Better off, as judged by themselves": bounded rationality and nudging
Cass R. Sunstein
39 An alternative behavioural public policy
Adam Oliver
40 Against nudging: Simon-inspired behavioral law and economics founded on ecological rationality
Nathan Berg
41 Bounded rationality in political science
Zachary A. McGee, Brooke N. Shannon, and Bryan D. Jones
42 Layering, expanding, and visualizing: lessons learned from three "process boosts" in action
Valentina Ferretti
43 Cognitive and affective consequences of information and choice overload
Elena Reutskaja, Sheena Iyengar, Barbara Fasolo, and Raffaella Misuraca
44 How much choice is "good enough"?: moderators of information and choice overload
Raffaella Misuraca, Elena Reutskaja, Barbara Fasolo, and Sheena Iyengar
Biography
Riccardo Viale is Full Professor of Cognitive Economics and Behavioural Sciences in the Department of Economics at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. He is also the founder and General Secretary of the Herbert Simon Society.
"From the studies and exchanges that lead Viale to conduct his research and teach in the most advanced universities in the world, the network of scholars was born who, on the basis of each person's skills, he drew on to compose the Handbook of Bounded Rationality...[This] network made up of over seventy scholars helps to enter into what remains one of the great mysteries of the human mind: how and why we make a decision rather than another." -Corriere della Sera
