Idag för 94 år sedan föddes ekonomipristagaren Herbert Simon. Inte minst förebådade han beteendeekonomin genom att lansera begreppet bounded rationality, för att klargöra att ekonomiska aktörer inte är perfekt rationella. Lite lästips:

• ”A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice”, publicerad i Quarterly Journal of Economics: ”Broadly stated, the task is to replace the global rationality of economic man with a kind of rational behavior that is compatible with the access to information and the computational capacities that are actually possessed by organisms, including man, in the kinds of environments in which such organisms exist.”
• ”Theories of Decision-Making in Economics and Behavioral Science”, publicerad i American Economic Review: ”In simple, slow-moving situations, where the actor has a single, operational goal, the assumption of maximization relieves us of any need to construct a detailed picture of economic man or his processes of adaptation. As the complexity of the environment increases, or its speed of change, we need to know more and more about the mechanisms and processes that economic man uses to relate himself to that environment and achieve his goals.”
• ”Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations”, Simons prisföreläsning 1978.
• Models of Bounded Rationality: Economic Analysis and Public Policy, Models of Bounded Rationality and Other Topics in Economics och Models of Bounded Rationality: Empirically Grounded Economic Reason, tre antologier från MIT Press med Simons texter.

Simon är väl värd att läsa även idag (även om jag är mindre övertygad än han om vikten av realistiska antaganden i ekonomisk teoretiserande). Han har stimulerat forskare som Ariel Rubinstein och Reinhard Selten att modellera begränsad rationalitet.