Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox by Unknown [The MIT Press, 2002] (Paperback) [Paperback]

by Unknown

Bounded The Adaptive Toolbox by Unknown [The MIT Press, 2002] (P...

Genres: Psychology, Economics, Philosophy, Science, Business

Paperback

First published February 19, 2001

About the author

Books can be attributed to "Unknown" when the author or editor (as applicable) is not known and cannot be discovered. If at all possible, list at least one actual author or editor for a book instead of using "Unknown".

Books whose authorship is purposefully withheld should be attributed instead to Anonymous.

Reviews

[Steven Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edited volume is an important addition to the work on human decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, in which people use "rules of thumb" to produce cost-effective decisions that are not strictly "rational." From the psychological literature, the work of Kahneman and Tversky is well know (and has been rewarded with international recognition). However, they do not explicitly link such behavior (often referred to as "heuristics") to evolution and biology. And they tend to define these "rules of thumb" as rather poor guides to decision making.

The essays in this edited volume provide a different--and more optimistic picture--of such heuristics. The contributors provide evidence and logic to suggest that evolution has led to the development of decision making shortcuts that "work" reasonably well.

One can disagree with certain aspects of this work (they may be a bit harsh on Kahneman and Tversky and their peers; they may be overly optimistic about some of the heuristics that they mention). Nonetheless, this work is a wonderful introduction to a literature on how humans actually think and decide--rather than relying on abstract conceptualizations often prevalent in the social sciences, including the simplistic "rational choice" theory ascendant in several social science disciplines. This book represents a welcome corrective to such perspectives.

[Jon Gauthier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields … tend to ignore these constraints and treat the mind as a Laplacean superintelligence equipped with unlimited resources of time, information, and computational might.

Heuristics in the adaptive toolbox are modeled on the actual cognitive abilities a species has rather than on the imaginary powers of omniscient demons.

Quite a few straight-talking articles here. Direct links to artificial intelligence, too—the founder of this school was Herbert Simon, after all.