Bounded Rationality and Politics (Wildavsky Forum Series)

Wildavsky Forum Series

by Jonathan Bendor

In Bounded Rationality and Politics , Jonathan Bendor considers two schools of behavioral economics―the first guided by Tversky and Kahneman’s work on heuristics and biases, which focuses on the mistakes people make in judgment and choice; the second as described by Gerd Gigerenzer’s program on fast and frugal heuristics, which emphasizes the effectiveness of simple rules of thumb. Finding each of these radically incomplete, Bendor’s illuminating analysis proposes Herbert Simon’s pathbreaking work on bounded rationality as a way to reconcile the inconsistencies between the two camps. Bendor shows that Simon’s theory turns on the interplay between the cognitive constraints of decision makers and the complexity of their tasks.

248 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

Reviews

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book includes a number of essays focused on bounded rationality in political science. Bendor contrasts the approach he adopts, largely shaped by the work of Herbert Simon, with research deriving from the foundational contributions of Tversky and Kahneman. According to Bendor, while the former approach focuses way that cognitively limited agents manage to successfully cope with limitations, often through organizational structures, the latter approach focuses on agents' limitations, noting the many ways that agents are error prone, susceptible to various biases.

Bendor and coauthors explore various aspects of the notion of organizations as mechanisms for coping with bounded rationality. A frequent theme of these essays is the idea that aspirations should often be lowered; otherwise, seeking the best outcomes may lead to excessive search and suboptimal results. The second essay provides an extensive review of Simon's contributions. The third essay discusses satisficing, arguing with some formalism that we can expect our heuristics to work reasonably well but not perfectly even in the long run. Essay 6 provides an extensive critique of the garbage can theory of organizational decision making and essay 7 provides an overview of the role of institutions in enabling agents to cope with bounded rationality.

The essays are well worth reading and while at times technical, the author makes great efforts to link formalization with intuitive and empirical considerations.