Bounded search

Simon trained in political science at Chicago and studied how decisions were really made in city government. From 1949 he worked at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he helped found the study of organisational behaviour and, with Allen Newell, the field of artificial intelligence: their Logic Theorist proved theorems in 1956. He received the Turing Award with Newell in 1975 and the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978.

• 1947 · Administrative Behavior

  Decisions inside organisations

  Organisations shape decisions by setting their premises: the goals, information and routines that each member takes as given.

• 1955 · A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice

  Bounded rationality

  Real decision makers have limited information and limited capacity to compute, so models of choice should start from those limits rather than from perfect optimisation.

• 1956 · Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment

  Satisficing

  People search until they find an option that is good enough by their current aspiration, and the structure of the environment decides how well that simple rule works.

• 1962 · The Architecture of Complexity

  Near-decomposability

  Complex systems that last tend to be built of nested parts that interact strongly inside and weakly between, so each part can be understood and repaired on its own.

• 1971 · Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World

  Attention is the scarce resource

  The more information arrives, the more attention it consumes, so attention rather than information becomes scarce, and good design filters rather than adds.

1. How does a person decide with limited time, attention and information?
2. With the time and information actually available, how would anyone have made this decision?
3. Which parts of the problem can be solved separately, and which interactions cannot be ignored?
4. Where is attention the bottleneck, and what is crowding it out?

A model of how people search for options can miss changing preferences, emotion and social context, and says little about where the sense of good enough comes from.