Foundations of Boundedly Rational Choice and Satisficing Decisions.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Decision Sciences Volume 2010, Article ID 798030, 16 pages doi:10.1155/2010/798030 Research Article Foundations of Boundedly Rational Choice and Satisficing Decisions K. Vela Velupillai Department of Economics, University of Trento, Via Inama 5, 381 00 Trento, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to K. Vela Velupillai, kvelupillai@ Received 25 December 2009; Accepted 15 April 2010 Academic Editor: James Moffat Copyright q 2010 K. Vela Velupillai. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Formally, the orthodox rational agent’s “Olympian” choices, as Simon has called orthodox rational choice, are made in a static framework. However, a formalization of consistent choice, underpinned by computability, suggests by, satisficing in a boundedly rational framework is not only more general than the model of “Olympian” rationality, it is also consistently dynamic. This kind of naturally process-oriented approach to the formalization of consistent choice can be interpreted and encapsulated within the framework of decision problems—in the formal sense of metamathematics and mathematical logic—which, in turn, is the natural way of formalizing the notion of Human Problem Solving in the Newell-Simon sense. 1. Introduction1 No one person better combined and encapsulated, in an intrinsically dynamic, decision-theoretic framework, a computationally founded 2 system of choice and decision, both entirely rational in a broad sense, than Herbert Simon. In this paper, I try, by standing on the shoulders of Herbert Simon, in fairly precise and formal