Decision theory, organisations
Herbert Simon
1916 – 2001
Bounded rationality makes the modest version of the same point: the information the plan requires is not available to the planner.
Read alongside: Sense · Shape
- Start with
- Administrative Behavior (1947)
- Where they resist the book
- Simon still wants better procedures. The book is less confident that procedure is the remedy for judgement.
Works worth the time
Administrative Behavior · 1947
Where the limits on the planner's information are set out as a theory of organisations rather than a complaint about them.
Read further
- Nobel Prize: Herbert A. Simon, Economic Sciences 1978 ↗
The Nobel Prize
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Bounded Rationality ↗
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Where Simon appears
Equilibrium models describe conditions that rarely hold.
Most planning inherits an equilibrium assumption: disturbance, response, return. Stacey's complex responsive processes describe organisations as continuously formed in local interaction, with no equilibrium to return to. Simon's bounded rationality makes the modest version of the same point — the information required by the plan is not available to the planner.