Essays that pay tribute to the wide-ranging influence of the late Herbert Simon, by friends and colleagues. Herbert Simon (1916-2001), in the course of a long and distinguished career in the social and behavioral sciences, made lasting contributions to many disciplines, including economics, psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations. His well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial addresses the implications of the decision-making and problem-solving processes for the social sciences. This book (the title is a variation on the title of Simon's autobiography, Models of My Life) is a collection of short essays, all original, by colleagues from many fields who felt Simon's influence and mourn his loss. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, the book represents "a small acknowledgment of a large debt." Each of the more than forty contributors was asked to write about the one work by Simon that he or she had found most influential. The editors then grouped the essays into four sections: "Modeling Man," "Organizations and Administration," "Modeling Systems," and "Minds and Machines." The contributors include such prominent figures as Kenneth Arrow, William Baumol, William Cooper, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, David Klahr, Franco Modigliani, Paul Samuelson, and Vernon Smith. Although they consider topics as disparate as "Is Bounded Rationality Unboundedly Rational?" and "Personal Recollections from 15 Years of Monthly Meetings," each essay is a testament to the legacy of Herbert Simon—to see the unity rather than the divergences among disciplines.

The Handbook of Rational Choice Social Research offers the first comprehensive overview of how the rational choice paradigm can inform empirical research within the social sciences. This landmark collection highlights successful empirical applications across a broad array of disciplines, including sociology, political science, economics, history, and psychology. Taking on issues ranging from financial markets and terrorism to immigration, race relations, and emotions, and a huge variety of other phenomena, rational choice proves a useful tool for theory- driven social research. Each chapter uses a rational choice framework to elaborate on testable hypotheses and then apply this to empirical research, including experimental research, survey studies, ethnographies, and historical investigations. Useful to students and scholars across the social sciences, this handbook will reinvigorate discussions about the utility and versatility of the rational choice approach, its key assumptions, and tools.

In a complex and uncertain world, humans and animals make decisions under the constraints of limited knowledge, resources, and time. Yet models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields largely ignore these real constraints and instead assume agents with perfect information and unlimited time. About forty years ago, Herbert Simon challenged this view with his notion of "bounded rationality." Today, bounded rationality has become a fashionable term used for disparate views of reasoning. This book promotes bounded rationality as the key to understanding how real people make decisions. Using the concept of an "adaptive toolbox," a repertoire of fast and frugal rules for decision making under uncertainty, it attempts to impose more order and coherence on the idea of bounded rationality. The contributors view bounded rationality neither as optimization under constraints nor as the study of people's reasoning fallacies. The strategies in the adaptive toolbox dispense with optimization and, for the most part, with calculations of probabilities and utilities. The book extends the concept of bounded rationality from cognitive tools to emotions; it analyzes social norms, imitation, and other cultural tools as rational strategies; and it shows how smart heuristics can exploit the structure of environments.

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A landmark tour of the new science of "idea flow" outlines revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence, explaining the virtually unlimited data sets of today's digital technologies and the considerable accuracy of information from social networks.

In this candid and witty autobiography, Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon looks at his distinguished and varied career, continually asking himself whether (and how) what he learned as a scientist helps to explain other aspects of his life. A brilliant polymath in an age of increasing specialization, Simon is one of those rare scholars whose work defines fields of inquiry. Crossing disciplinary lines in half a dozen fields, Simon's story encompasses an explosion in the information sciences, the transformation of psychology by the information-processing paradigm, and the use of computer simulation for modeling the behavior of highly complex systems. Simon's theory of bounded rationality led to a Nobel Prize in economics, and his work on building machines that think—based on the notion that human intelligence is the rule-governed manipulation of symbols—laid conceptual foundations for the new cognitive science. Subsequently, contrasting metaphors of the maze (Simon's view) and of the mind (neural nets) have dominated the artificial intelligence debate. There is also a warm account of his successful marriage and of an unconsummated love affair, letters to his children, columns, a short story, and political and personal intrigue in academe.

The notion of bounded rationality was initiated in the 1950s by Herbert Simon; only recently has it influenced mainstream economics. In this book, Ariel Rubinstein defines models of bounded rationality as those in which elements of the process of choice are explicitly embedded. The book focuses on the challenges of modeling bounded rationality, rather than on substantial economic implications. In the first part of the book, the author considers the modeling of choice. After discussing some psychological findings, he proceeds to the modeling of procedural rationality, knowledge, memory, the choice of what to know, and group decisions.In the second part, he discusses the fundamental difficulties of modeling bounded rationality in games. He begins with the modeling of a game with procedural rational players and then surveys repeated games with complexity considerations. He ends with a discussion of computability constraints in games. The final chapter includes a critique by Herbert Simon of the author's methodology and the author's response. The Zeuthen Lecture Book series is sponsored by the Institute of Economics at the University of Copenhagen.