In his Mattioli Lectures, Nobel Laureate Professor Herbert A. Simon directs attention to the kinds of empirical research that are necessary for progress in microeconomics. He traces the development of neoclassical economic theory and its gradual retreat from empiricism to abstraction. He then discusses the importance of business firms to the economic system, and the need for a thoroughly empirical understanding of how organisations work and reach their decisions. Finally, he examines innovative approaches to empirical research, including experimental economics, observational methods for studying economic behaviour, and the kinds of simulation models that are needed to interpret decision process. A round-table discussion of these issues follows; the participants, in addition to Professor Simon, are Professors Claudio Dematte, Massimo Egidi, Richard M. Goodwin, Robert Marris, Aldo Montesano and Riccardo Viale.

Product Description: Throughout Herbert Simon's wide-ranging career—in public administration, business administration, economics, cognitive psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and computer science—his central aim has been to explain the nature of the thought processes that people use in making decisions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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The author reviews his life as a Nobel laureate in economics and his role as the father of artificial intelligence and asks himself how his life as a scientist helps explain his own behavior

While psychologists have often employed the technique of protocol analysis—or the use of the subject's own verbal reports as data—in exploring cognitive processes, the nature and reliability of the method have been poorly understood. This book finally puts protocol analysis on firm ground by examining its underlying assumptions, techniques, and limitations. It addresses such key questions as what sorts of reports about what sorts of mental events are reliable; what the role of the investigator's interpretations should be in helping to understand such data; and what mental events cannot be explained by protocols. The authors describe a general theory of cognitive processes and structure, which, they argue, accounts for verbalization and verbal reports. The theory is presented in the form of an information processing model. Major issues surrounding the use and validity of verbal reports are taken up and empirical studies are discussed within the framework of the model. While the book focuses on reports of cognitive processes, the concepts and models it employs can be extended to such areas of verbal behavior as psychophysics, survey design, and measurement of personality traits. A Bradford Book

Product Description: What can reason (or more broadly, thinking) do for us and what can't it do? This is the question examined by Herbert A. Simon, who received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering work on decision-making processes in economic organizations...read more

The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Herbert Simon in 1978. At Carnegie-Mellon University he holds the title of Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. These two facts together delineate the range and uniqueness of his contributions in creating meaningful interactions among fields that developed in isolation but that are all concerned with human decision-making and problem-solving processes. In particular, Simon has brought the insights of decision theory, organization theory (especially as it applies to the business firm), behavior modeling, cognitive psychology, and the study of artificial intelligence to bear on economic questions. This has led not only to new conceptual dimensions for theoretical constructions, but also to a new humanizing realism in economics, a way of taking into account and dealing with human behavior and interactions that lie at the root of all economic activity. The sixty papers and essays contained in these two volumes are grouped under eight sections, each with a brief introductory essay. These are: Some Questions of Public Policy, Dynamic Programming Under Uncertainty; Technological Change; The Structure of Economic Systems; The Business Firm as an Organization; The Economics of Information Processing; Economics and Psychology; and Substantive and Procedural Reality. Most of Simon's papers on classical and neoclassical economic theory are contained in volume one. The second volume collects his papers on behavioral theory, with some overlap between the two volumes.

Now highly expanded in length and in the sweep of its intellectual design—the range of its consideration of social and economic systems has been extended and there is new material on human psychology—this book has been highly regarded and widely referenced since its publication in 1969. In that year a review in Science stated that "Herbert Simon is one of the leaders in the present development of a science of complex information processing. His contributions have been seminal in several different fields, yet always unified in their attempt to develop a precise and adequate theory of complex systems, whether social, political, or economic organizations or thinking, feeling, creating brains and computer-programmed models. The Sciences of the Artificial is a thoughtful synthesis of Simon's conception of complexity—how it arises, how it can be studied by a scientist, and how it can be coped with, adapted to, and understood by intelligent entities such as human beings and 'artificial intelligence' programs.... It is authoritative and at the same time provocative—a rare combination." "Artificial" is used in a very specific sense in this book: to denote systems that have a given form and behavior only because they adapt (or are adapted), in reference to goals or purposes, to their environment. Thus both man-made artifacts and man himself, in terms of behavior, are artificial. This edition contains three entirely new chapters—"Economic Rationality: Adaptive Artifice," "Remembering and Learning: Memory as External Environment," and "Social Planning: Designing the Evolving Artifact"—which have been interspersed among the original four: "Understanding the Natural and the Artificial Worlds," "The Psychology of Thinking: Embedding Artifice in Nature," "The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial," and "The Architecture of Complexity."

Product Description: It is fast becoming a cliche that scientific discovery is being rediscovered. For two philosophical generations (that of the Founders and that of the Followers of the logical positivist and logical empiricist movements), discovery had been consigned to the domain of the intractable, the ineffable, the inscrutable...read more

Discusses the problems, values, rationales, psychology, and equilibrium of administrative organization

A set of related papers dealing with the meaning of causality in simulataneous dynamic equation systems. Investigation of the systems which only approximately satisfy the conditions enabling the definition of causality, leads to a set of limiting theorems concerning the dynamic behavior of such systems over time, and estimation procedures for the parameters of such systems. Implications of these theorems for some well-known propositions in economics and other social sciences are considered.