Abstract
One of the great tragedies in economics in the decades since Simon received the 1978 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is that the uptake of his ideas within the discipline has been either poor or in a partial manner that does not properly capture his vision (as with mainstream models purporting to address bounded rationality). In this chapter I begin by trying to make sense of this situation and then argue that the digital revolution is making it more imperative than ever that economists take up Simon’s key ideas — not merely his satisncing view of choice in the face of bounded rationality but also his thinking on artificial intelligence and the evolutionary roles of altruism and system design. The modern economy is undergoing supply side upheavals at the heart of which lie the issues of programmability and modularity. On the demand side, buyers now have to contend with choice problems of extraordinary complexity, whose solutions increasingly rely on social inputs.
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Earl, P.E. (2016). Bounded Rationality in the Digital Age. In: Frantz, R., Marsh, L. (eds) Minds, Models and Milieux. Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442505_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442505_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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