The Rhetorical Dimensions of Bounded Rationality: Herbert A. Simon and Organizational Economics

Nicolai Foss ()

No 2002-07, IVS/CBS Working Papers from Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy, Copenhagen Business School

Abstract: I discuss the rhetorical dimensions of bounded rationality in two different, yet related, contexts, namely in the practice of organizational economists and in Herbert Simon’s key attempts to persuade economists to take bounded rationality seriously, his Ely lecture and his Nobel Prize lecture. I discuss various reasons why Simon failed to convince his contemporaries, among other things, the absence of clear definitions of bounded rationality and heuristics for incorporating it into economic models. Simon’s failures in these respects help explaining the very modest, and mainly “rhetorical,” use of bounded rationality in the works of organizational economists.

Keywords: Herbert Simon; bounded rationality; organizational economics; rhetoric. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 D23 M1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hpe and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ep.lib.cbs.dk/download/ISBN/8778690862.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to ep.lib.cbs.dk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ivs:iivswp:02-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IVS/CBS Working Papers from Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy, Copenhagen Business School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by J. Petur Joensen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).