Center for American Politics and Public Policy Department of Political Science
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
Bounded Rationality
Bryan D. Jones
Department of Political Science
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
November 1998
To appear in the Annual Review of Political Science, Nelson Polsby, Editor
Discussion Paper
Policy Agendas Project
Bounded Rationality
Abstract
Findings from behavioral organization theory, behavioral decision theory, survey rearch and experimental economics leave no doubt about the failure of rational choice as a descriptive model of human behavior. But this does not mean that people and their politics are irrational. Bounded rationality asrts that decision-makers are intendedly rational; that is, they are goal-oriented and adaptive, but becau of human cognitive and emotional architecture, they sometimes fail, occasionally in important decisions. Limits on rational adaptation are of two types: procedural limits, which are limits on how we go about making decisions, and substantive limits, which affect particular choices directly.
Rational analysis in institutional contexts can rve as a standard for adaptive, goal-oriented human
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behavior. In relatively fixed task environments, such as ast markets or elections, we should be able to divide behavior into adaptive, goal-oriented behavior (that is, rational action) and behavior that is a conquence of processing limits, and measure the deviation. The extent of deviation is an empirical issue. The class are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, and may be examined empirically in situations in which actors make repeated similar choices.
Bounded Rationality1
Do people make rational decisions in politics and economics? Not if by ‘rational’we mean conformity to the classic expected utility model. There is no longer any doubt about the weight of the scientific evidence: the expected utility model of economic and political decision-making is not sustainable empirically. From the laboratory comes failure after failure of rational expected utility to account for human behavior. From systematic obrvation in organizational ttings, scant evidence of behavior bad on the expected utility model emerges.
Does this mean that people (and therefore their politics) are irrational? Not at all. People making choices are intendedly rational. They want to make rational decisions, but they cannot always do so.
What is the implication for politics? That rational respons to the environment characterize decisio
n-making generally, but at points—oftentimes important points—rationality fails, and as a conquence there is a mismatch between the decision-making environment and the choices of the decision-maker. We refer to this mismatch as
‘bounded rationality showing through’ (Simon 1996).
This conception has an important implication. In structured situations, at least, we may conceive of any decision as having two components: that relating to environmental demands (en by the individual as incentives, positive or negative), and that relating to bounds on adaptability in the given decision-making situation. An analysis bad on rational choice, in the ideal, should be able to specify what the environmental incentives are, and predict decisions bad on tho incentives. What cannot be explained is either random error (even the most rational of us may make an occasional mistake, but they are not systematic) or is ‘bounded rationality showing through’. Standard statistical techniques give us the tools to distinguish systematic from random factors, so in principle it should be possible to distinguish the rational, adaptive portion of a decision from bounds on rationality.
One may think of any decision as being caud by two ts of sources. One is the external environ
ment: how we respond to the incentives facing us. The other is the internal environment: tho parts of our internal make-ups that caus us to deviate from the demands of the external environment (Simon 1996b).
We are not, however, thrown into a situation in which all residual systematic deviations from rational choices are treated prima facie as bounded rationality. A very limited t of facets of human cognitive architecture accounts for a very large proportion of the deviations from adaptation. The may be placed into two class: procedural limits, which are limits on how we go about making decisions, and substantive limits, which affect particular choices directly. Of procedural limits, I cite two as being extraordinarily important in structured, institutional ttings (such as voting in mass publics or in legislative bodies): attention and emotion. Of substantive limits, I cite but one: the tendency of humans to “over-cooperate”—that is, to cooperate more than strict adherence to rationality would dictate.
The primary argument in this essay is that most behavior in politics is adaptive and intendedly rational, but that limits on adaptive behavior impod by human
1 The analysis prented here is further developed in my Traces of Eve: Adaptive Behavior and its Limits in Political and Economic Institutions (forthcoming).
cognitive/emotional architecture may be detected in even the most stable of environments. I advocate a rearch strategy which explicitly divides political action into the two categories (at least in stable task environments), and explores empirically the implications for the outputs of institutions and the institutional process responsible for tho outcomes.
Bounded Rationality: Birth and Development
Bounded rationality is a school of thought about decision-making that developed from dissatisfaction with the ‘comprehensively rational’ economic and decision-theory models of choice. Tho models assume that preferences are defined over outcomes, that tho outcomes are known and fixed, and that decision-makers maximize by choosing the alternative that yields the highest level of benefits (discounted by costs). The subjective expected utility variant of rational choice integrates risk and uncertainty into the model by associating a probability distribution, estimated by the decision-maker, with outcomes. The decision-maker maximizes expected utility. Choices among competing goals are handled by indifference curves—generally postulated to be smooth (‘twice differentiable’)--that specify substitutability among goals.
A major implication of the approach is that behavior is determined by the mix of incentives facing the
decision-maker. A cond implication is that adjustment to the incentives is instantaneous; true maximizers have no learning curves.
Like comprehensive rationality, bounded rationality assumes that actors are goal-oriented, but bounded rationality takes into account the cognitive limitations of decision-makers in attempting to achieve tho goals. Its scientific approach is different: rather than make assumptions about decision-making and model the implications mathematically for aggregate behavior (such as markets or legislatures), bounded rationality adopts an explicitly behavioral stance: the behavior of decision-makers must be examined, whether in the laboratory or in the field.
The Birth of Bounded Rationality
Herbert Simon (in press; e also Simon 1996a) has recently reminded political scientists that the notion of bounded rationality and many of its ramifications originated in political science. Over his long career, Simon made major contributions not only to his field of academic study, political science (as the founder of the behavioral study of organizations), but also to economics (as a Nobelist), psychology (as a founding father of cognitive psychology), and computer science (as an initiator of the field of artificial intelligence).
In the 1940s and 50s Simon developed a model of choice intended as a challenge to the comprehensive rationality assumptions ud in economics. The model first appeared in print in Administrative Behavior (1947), which was written as a critique of existing theories of public administration and as a proposal for a new approach for the study of organizations—decision-making. Simon gives great credit for the initiation of his innovative work to the behavioral revolution in political science at the University of Chicago, where he studied for all of his academic degrees. While most political scientists are aware of Simon’s contributions, many fail to appreciate that bounded rationality was
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the first, and, becau of its ripple effects in so many disciplines, the most important idea (even academic school of thought) that political science has ever exported.2
for的用法A brief retelling of the tale is in order. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Simon returned to his native Milwaukee in 1935 to obrve budgeting in the city’s Recreation Department. He writes that
I came as a gift-bearing Greek, fresh from an intermediate price theory cour taught by the grandfather of Chicago-School neoclassical laisz-faire economics, Henry Simons. . . My economic
s training showed me how to budget rationally. Simply compare the marginal utility of a propod expenditure with its marginal cost, and approve it only if the utility exceeds the cost. However, what I saw in Milwaukee didn’t em to be an application of this rule. I saw a lot of bargaining, of reference back to last year’s budget, and incremental changes in it. If the word “marginal” was ever spoken, I misd it. Moreover, which participants would support which items was quite predictable. . . I could e a clear connection between people’s positions on budget matters and the values and beliefs that prevailed in their sub-organizations.
I brought back to my friends and teachers in economics two gifts, which I ultimately called “organizational identification” and “bounded rationality”. (Simon in press).
In his autobiography, Simon noted the importance of the two notions for his later contributions to organization theory, economics, psychology, and computer science:
I would not object to having my whole scientific output described as largely a gloss—a rather elaborate gloss, to be sure—[on the two ideas] (Simon 1996a: 88).
Bounded rationality and organizational identification (which is today en as a conquence of bounded rationality) won ready acceptance in political science, with its emerging empiricist orientatio
n, but were largely ignored in the more theoretical discipline of economics. Or, as Simon (in press) puts it, economists “mostly ignored [bounded rationality] and went on counting the angels on the heads of neoclassical pins.”Procedural Rationality
Simon spent a great deal of time and energy attacking the abstract and rarefied economic decision-making models. Much of his attack was negative—showing how the model did not comport with how people really made decisions. But Simon also developed what he termed a ‘procedural’ model of rationality—bad on the psychological process of reasoning—in particular his explanation of how people conduct incomplete arch and make trade-offs between values.
Since the organism, like tho of the real world, has neither the ns nor the wits to discover an ‘optimal’ path—even assuming the concept of optimal to be clearly defined—we are concerned only with finding a choice mechanism that will lead it to pursue a ‘satisficing’ path that will permit satisfaction at some specified level of all of its needs (Simon 1957:270-71).
singletonSimon elaborated on his satisficing organism over the years, but its fundamental characteristics did not change. They include:
签署英文1.Limitation on the organism’s ability to plan long behavior quences, a
小学英语教学论文网limitation impod by the bounded cognitive ability of the organism as well as
the complexity of the environment in which it operates.
变形金刚1主题曲2 Two recent incidences convinced me of the need to remind political scientists that Simon’s “tribal allegiance” (Simon, in press) is to our discipline. A well-regarded political scientist recently commented that “I didn’t know that Simon was a political scientist.” In a written review, a cognitive psychologist, somewhat haughtily, informed me that Simon’s work on organizations, and in particular Simon and March’s Organizations, was written to extend his work on problem-solving to organizational behavior. Of cour the intellectual path was the other way around.
2.The tendency to t aspiration levels for each of the multiple goals that the
organism faces.
3.The tendency to operate on goals quentially rather than simultaneously
becau of the ‘bottleneck of short-term memory’.
4.Satisficing rather than optimizing arch behavior:
An alternative satisfices if it meets aspirations along all dimensions [attributes]. If no such alternative is found, arch is undertaken for new alternatives. Meanwhile, aspirations along one or more dimensions drift down gradually until a satisfactory new alternative is found or some existing alternative satisfices (Simon 1996b:30).
In detailing the general requirements of an organism operating under bounded (as contrasted with comprehensive) rationality, Simon (1983: 20-22; e also Simon 1995) notes the following requisites:
•“some way of focusing attention”
• “a mechanism for generating alternatives”
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•“a capacity for acquiring facts about the environment”
•“a modest capacity for drawing inferences from the facts”
I cannot do justice to the importance for other disciplines of Simon’s “gloss” on bounded rationality. Just one note: the study of problem-solving is grounded in the intended rationality of problem-solvers, as is the study of judgment (Newell 1990, 1958). By imposing a task environment, experime
nters can examine that part of the problem-solver’s behavior that may be explained objectively, via the nature of the task environment, and compare it to that part that can only be explained with reference to failures to overcome systematic internal limitations—bounded rationality showing through (Newell and Simon 1972; Simon 1996b).
proviewThe principle that rationality is intended but not always achieved, that what
‘shows through’ from the inner environment of the problem-solver can be systematically studied, is a principle that I will argue is of extraordinary utility in the study of human behavior in relatively t institutional task environments.
Bounded Rationality in Political Sciencechesterfield
Bounded rationality has been a key component since the 1950s in public administration and public policy studies. In more recent times, partly in reaction to the attitudinal model of voting behavior, the approach has been ud to understand political reasoning (Iyengar 1990; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991; Marcus and McKuen 1993). Nevertheless, bounded rationality, born in organization theory (Simon 1947), has had its greatest impact in political science in the study of governmental organizations.
The fundamental premi underlying organizational studies in political science is that organizational behavior mimics the bounded rationality of the actors that inhabited them (March 1994). This correspondence is not simply an analogy among phenomena at different levels; the relationship is causal. This premi characterized behavioral organization theory generally, along with the insistence that organizational science be grounded in the obrvation of behavior in (and analysis of data from) organizational ttings. The most important components of the political theory of organizations were the concepts of limited attention spans, habituation and routine, and organizational identification. Uncertainty, unlike the SEU approach, was viewed not as simple
