Notes on "Bounded rationality"

"When, abandoning the a priorism of neoclassical economical economics, I looked at actual decision making and problem solving, I saw a creature of bounded rationality using heuristic search to find satisficing -- "good enough" -- courses of action...

"Economists did not flock to the banner of satisficing with its bounded rationality. These ideas still remain well outside the mainstream of economics -- but not indefinitely. For they provided a realistic picture of human choices, a picture that may instruct us about some of the puzzling problems of economics today: decision making under uncertainty, business cycles with their accompanying natural or unnatural unemployment, the role of entrepreneurship in investment, and others.

"But there is backbreaking empirical work ahead, for the theory of bounded rationality does not permit all one's theorems to flow from a few a priori truths. Fixing the postulates of such a theory requires close, almost microscopic, study of how people actually behave."

Models of My Life, Herbert Simon, p. 364

"When people don't know how to optimize, they may very well be able to satisfice, to find good enough solutions. And good enough solutions can often be found by heuristic search through the maze of possibilities"

Models of My Life, Herbert Simon, p. 370