Elgar Companion to Herbert Simon

‘We all owe a lot to the work of Herbert Simon. This innovative Companion describes how his thought leadership continues to inspire research in behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and Artificial Intelligence today.’ – Iris Bohnet, former Academic Dean, Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Kennedy School, US‘This essential Companion explores Herbert Simon’s profound contributions to a variety of fields, some of which he helped to found. Encouraging readers to adopt a “Simonian lens”, it invites reflection on his ideas and inspires a fresh outlook on bounded rationality. An often personal homage, it ensures the vibrancy and impact of Simon’s legacy.’ – Ralph Hertwig, Leibniz Prize 2017 and Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany‘Herbert Simon remains a father figure to the social sciences. These chapters build on Simon’s work and show how relevant his thinking is to the fields of economics, psychology, decision-making and management, and artificial intelligence. The book is a rich source of ideas: Simon for the twenty-first century.’ – Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England and co-author of Radical Uncertainty‘With the astonishing richness and variety of his gifts and the commensurate diversity of the fields to which he made lasting contributions, Herb Simon calls to mind the redoubtable John von Neuman. Neither can be said to have contended contented themselves with “satisficing”. If Simon preached bounded rationality, he practiced unbounded creativity.’ – Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, UK‘The discoveries and intuitions of Herb Simon, one of the intellectual giants of the Twentieth Century, continue to be a fertile source of advancements in multiple fields - psychology, economics, political and organization theory, artificial intelligence and computer science. This book witnesses such fecundity, flagging several directions of exploration, including, among others, the nature and importance of heuristics for both behaviours and cognition, the analogies and difference between minds and computers, the evolutionary role of quasi-decomposable systems. To be read.’ – Giovanni Dosi, Institute of Economics, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy‘There are very few geniuses in psychology, economics, and computer science; but Herbert A. Simon was perhaps unique in history in being an acknowledged genius in all three fields. It is little wonder that his work has been cited almost half-a-million times! I am so pleased that Edward Elgar is publishing this volume in honor of Simon’s work, with three highly distinguished editors. This book will be a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual antecedents of so much of the scholarly and other work being done in these three fields, and allied fields, today. What a great tribute to Herb Simon, one of the scholars I admire most in the world, and whom I had the privilege of knowing personally.’ – Robert J Sternberg, Cornell University, New York, US

Edited by Gerd Gigerenzer, Herbert Simon Society; Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany, Shabnam Mousavi, Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENTAI), Turin, Italy and Riccardo Viale, Herbert Simon Society, BIB-Behavioral Insights Bicocca of University of Milan Bicocca and School of Government, LUISS, Rome, Italy.