Content
Introduction………………………………………………………………..……3
1.Personality of Herbert Simon………………………………………………...5
2. School theory social systems…………………………….…...…..10
3. Main directions scientific management Simon………………12
4. Differences in the views of Simon with Veblen and Bernard……………..18
Conclusion………………………………………………………….….…........21
List of used literature………………………………........ ....22
Introduction
In American sociological literature in the 1960s and 70s. many authors appeared, most of whom mainly relied on the views of the “pioneers” of the “social systems” school, differing from them only in nuances and accents. The names of individual authors periodically gained popularity, and then gradually fell into oblivion. But the approach of this school to various forms of enterprises and organizations, primarily as a "social system", undoubtedly established itself as one of the leading directions in the development of organization theory. Representatives of the "system" school characterize the organization as a large, complex social system that interacts with other systems both outside and within this system. The concept of "modern organization" is identified with a system that requires an integrated, comprehensive approach, taking into account its multifactorial and multipurpose significance.
One of the representatives of the school of "social systems" is Herbert Simon. Many believe that Herbert Simon's work on the principles of "decision making" by firms under uncertainty caused a revolution in microeconomics because it contradicted the rationality premise of the subject often assumed in traditional microeconomics writings. Of course, Herbert Simon was not the first who dared to criticize these provisions, but his work in this direction is still the most famous, and Simon himself was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978. Simon began his scientific career in the Coles Commission and, naturally, his first work was in this direction. The most important work of this period is the paper of 1949, which defines the "Hawkins-Simon" conditions for non-negative square matrices.
Subsequently, Simon began to study industrial organizations, and one of the many conclusions was the proof that the internal organization of the firm and the decisions it makes regarding behavior in the external market do not correspond well to neoclassical theories about "rational" decision-making. In his numerous works after the 1950s. Simon paid close attention to decision-making issues, and eventually put forward a theory of behavior based on "bounded rationality". He argued that workers face the uncertainty of the future and the uncertainty of the costs of obtaining information in the present. Thus, these two factors limit the ability of workers to make fully rational decisions. Simon argued that they can only make "boundedly rational" decisions, and are forced to make decisions according to not "maximization", but only "satisfaction", that is, setting a certain level at which they will be completely satisfied, and if it is impossible to achieve this level, they will either lower the level of their claims, or change their mind. These "rules of thumb" determine the greatest results that can be achieved in the "limited" and uncertain real world. Simon supported his conclusions with numerous studies of the decision-making process in industrial enterprises, as a result of which enterprises began to apply the "new" theory of the firm as a "satisfying" rather than a "maximizing" agent. Simon's theory of bounded rationality has become an integral part of the New Institutional Economics.
- Personality of Herbert Simon
By 1933, when Simon entered the University of Chicago, he decided to become a mathematician in the field of social sciences. His curriculum included political economy, logic, mathematics, biophysics, and econometrics. While studying physics as a student, he showed an interest in the philosophical problems of physics that remained throughout his subsequent life and subsequently published several articles on these problems.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1936, Simon became an assistant researcher in the municipal government of the city of Chicago. His early work in this area led to his appointment in 1939 as director of a research group at the University of California dealing with similar topics. Three years later, after the expiration of the research funds, Simon returned to Chicago to continue his graduate studies. Along with his studies, he worked as an assistant professor of political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
After receiving his doctorate in 1943, Simon remained at the University of Chicago, where in 1946 he was appointed head of the political science department.
In 1948, he briefly went to work in the state administrative apparatus, accepting the position of one of the assistants to the government of the United States in order to participate in the creation of the Economic Cooperation Administration, formed to implement the "Marshall Plan" (named for the state Secretary George Marshall) to assist Western European countries for their economic recovery after the Second World War.
In 1949, Simon moved from Chicago to Pittsburgh, where he helped organize a new high school Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. There he became a professor in administration. Since 1965 he has been a professor in the Department of Computational Sciences and Psychology. In this position, he has done research in psychology, information processing, computer modeling of cognitive processes, organization theory, artificial intelligence, and decision theory.
In 1947, one of Simon's several books on decision-making organization theories, Administrative Behavior, was published. In it, he described the business firm as an adaptive system, including material, human, and social components, interconnected by a communication network and the common desire of its members to cooperate with each other to achieve common goals. Simon rejected the classical notion of the firm as an omniscient, profit-maximizing enterprise.
Instead, he showed that in a firm, decisions are made collectively by its members, and their ability to act rationally is limited both by the inability to foresee all the consequences of their decisions, and by their personal aspirations and social prospects. Because such a decision-making process can only lead to satisfactory rather than the best results, Simon concluded that firms do not aim to maximize profits, but to find acceptable solutions to the complex problems they face. This situation often forces us to set conflicting goals.
In Models of Man (1957) and Organization (1958), Simon further develops the theories put forward in Administrative Behavior. He is sure that the classical theory of decision making lacked an important element - a description of the behavioral and cognitive qualities of those people who process information and make decisions.
Much of Simon's later research was devoted to the problems of artificial intelligence and the computerization of science. As early as 1952, a discussion with Allen Newell, then a scientific researcher at the Rand Corporation, sparked his interest in these issues. They both started doing research together in the field of problem solving using computer simulation, and over time this area became central to Simon's scientific work. Since 1961, Newell, moving to Carnegie Mellon University, where he entered the position of professor, fully joined Simon. Continuing their collaboration, these scientists published in 1972 the book The Solution to Human Problems. In addition to empirical research in the field of decision-making in business and business psychology S. studied the relationship between the size of firms andtheir economic growthand made a significant contribution to the central problem of aggregation of microsystems.
Simon's theories have been criticized, especially by such highly respected economists like Edward Mason, Fritz Machlup and Milton Friedman. While appreciating the merits of Simon's descriptive decision theory, they questioned its value for economic analysis. In addition, his realistic attitude to the decision-making process undermined the basic postulates of the theory of general equilibrium and the simple hypotheses of maximizing and optimizing functions. arrived and utility on which this theory is based. However, these seemingly antagonistic approaches address different sets of problems in economics and are therefore complementary. Simon opened the field of empirical testing of the hypotheses on which the decision-making process is based.
Simon was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for economy for 1978 "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations." During the presentation and presentation of the award, Sune Carlson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, stated that “studying the structure of the firm and making internal decisions has become an important taskeconomics. And in this new field of research, Simon's work proved to be extremely important. Simon's theories and observations in the field of organizational decision-making are fully applicable to the systems and techniques of planning, budgeting, and control that are used in both business and public administration. They therefore form an excellent basis for conducting empirical research.”
In his autobiographical essay, he noted that “in the politics of science that arose from my other activities, I adhered to two guiding principles - to strive for greater “rigor” in the social sciences so that they were better equipped with the tools necessary to solve the problems that confronted them. difficult tasks, and to promote close interaction between natural and social scientists so that they can jointly apply their special knowledge and skills to those many complex issues of public policy that require both types of wisdom.
In 1937 Herbert Simon married Dorothy Pye. They have a son and two daughters. He himself is fond of walking, mountain climbing, painting and playing the piano. He is fluent in several languages.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, he received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Contribution to Science Award (1969). He is a member of the American Economic Association, American Psychological Association, Econometric Society, American Sociological Association, American National Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded honorary degrees by the Universities of Chicago, Yale, McGill, Lund and Erasmus (Rotterdam).
- School of Social Systems Theory
Communication is usually understood as a method by which an action is called in various parts of the system. But communication is designed not only to encourage action, but also to be a means of control and coordination. The communication system forms the structure, configuration of the organization.
Equilibrium as a connecting process is considered as a mechanism for stabilizing the organizational whole, its adaptation to changing conditions. The purpose of this mechanism is also to "harmonize" the needs and attitudes of individuals with the requirements of the organization.
The decision-making process is considered by the school of "social systems" to be the most important means of regulation and "strategic leadership". In accordance with this, the organization itself is often interpreted as a decision-making tool.
The main integrating factor of the organization is usually recognized as the goal. In this case, a distinction is often made between the goals set for a given organization and the goals inherent in all organizations as such. The latter goals are considered to be driven by internal needs for growth and survival.
Based on the analysis of social organization, representatives of the school of "social systems" are trying to identify the universal, permanent elements of any organization in general ("organizational universals"), inherent in both clockwork and social. Such a desire to create a universal theory of the organizational process is combined with attempts to apply the achievements of cybernetics, mathematical methods, etc. to solving the same problem. But, ultimately, all these studies are subordinated to the particular task of creating a theory of organizational management, which, first of all, is applied to industrial enterprises.
So, the "school of social systems" considers the organization as a complex system with a number of its individual subsystems. These subsystems usually include the individual, the formal structure, the informal structure, the informal organization, statuses and roles, and the physical environment. Together they are defined as an organizational system. The central methodological concept is the concept of "connection", or "linking processes". There are three main connecting processes: "communication", "balance", "decision making".
As already noted, the school of "social systems" was strongly influenced by the structural-functional trend in American sociological theory, and above all the works of T. Parsons and R. Merton.
The school of "social systems" tried from the standpoint of the latest sociological concepts to critically analyze previous views on the nature and methods of management and generalize new practical experience in the field of organization and management.
Along with Herbert Simon, representatives of the school of "social systems" are also Alvin Goldner and Chester Barnard.
- Simon's Scientific Management Focus
The first decision that any member of an organization makes is the decision to participate or, on the contrary, not to participate in it. Following Barnard's "principle of equilibrium", Simon believes that each person, in investing his labor or capital in a given organization, proceeds from the fact that the satisfaction that he will derive from the "pure excess of incentives over contribution", "measured in relation to their usefulness to him ”, more than the satisfaction that he would have received by refusing to participate in this organization. Thus, the "zero point" in such a "satisfaction function" is defined in relation to the "possible cost of participation".
If, considering the issue of his participation in the organization, the individual is guided by personal considerations, then after making a positive decision, personal goals gradually fade into the background and are subordinate to the goals of the organization. If the "mechanism of influence" in an organization is set up in such a way as to create a balance between motivation and contribution, in which all members of the organization are ready to actively participate in its activities, devoting all their energy to the tasks of the organization, such an organization has, according to Simon, "a high moral standard ".
Simon examines in detail the various components of the "mechanism of influence", among which he assigns the most important place to authority, and also explores other external influences: training, recommendations, attention-grabbing messages, etc. The essence of Simon's concept is that managers must effectively use all forms of external influences to influence the personality of the employee, to transform a person to such an extent that he performs the desired actions "rather as a result of his own motivation than under the influence of instructions received at the moment ".
Paying tribute to the doctrine of "human relations", Simon tries to combine it with a systematic approach to the organization of management. He draws an ideal diagram of the functioning of an organization in which the activities of all its members are motivated by the desire to contribute to the effectiveness of the organization due to the optimal identification of personal and common goals. This, he is convinced, will reduce the need for authority only to making adjustments, since the need for its application in the form of sanctions will lose any significant significance. Simon draws an even more far-reaching conclusion, stating that modern society places more and more authority on "functional status" and less and less on hierarchy. From this point of view, the members of the organization are increasingly
they get used to accepting the proposals of functional specialists, since there is, on the one hand, “faith in competence”, and on the other hand, “the good intentions of those in power” .
Simon pays considerable attention to the problem of communication in the organizational system. He defines communication as "any process by which the premises for decision making are transferred from one member of an organization to another." This indicates the two-way nature of the relationship: the flow of information to the center where decisions are made, and the transfer of decisions from the center to other parts of the organization, in other words, the process of transferring the decision takes place not only vertically, but also horizontally, or, as Simon puts it, "laterally throughout the organization." Unlike Barnard, Simon places less emphasis on the "formal network of authority", emphasizing the importance of informal channels of communication.
Representatives of the school of "social systems" pay considerable attention to the problem of "divergence or differentiation of goals" of the organization, due to the complication of the organizational structure and the increase in the number of divisions. Applying systems analysis to the process of "differentiating goals" of an organization, March and Simon distinguish four "variables" that directly affect and determine this process:
1) the system and procedure for selecting personnel and "types of interaction", generating a commonality of goals for members of a given group, subgroup or unit;
2) “excessive organizational resources”, “weaknesses in the organizational structure”, which groups or subgroups can use to form their subgoals that differ from the goals of the organization as a whole;
3) effectiveness ("operationality") or possible ineffectiveness of the overall goals of the organization as a whole, as a result of which there is a need to clarify and clarify them through the use of various incentives, including the reward system;
4) differences in individual perception, which depend in part on the following factors:
a) the number of sources of information;
b) share of information received;
c) cognitive abilities that underlie the process of making organizational decisions.
A significant place in the studies of the school of "social systems" is occupied by the problem of choosing criteria for constructing units in an organization. Rejecting the principle of departmentalization put forward by the "classical" theory. Simon believes that the division of the organization into divisions should be based on the types of decisions that will be made, and the main criterion for evaluating the structure should be its impact on behavior. “By analyzing the premises of major decisions,” writes Simon, “one can predict the main contours of the decision-making process ... and from the decision-making process, the main features of the organizational structure.”
The subject of social studies of the school of "social systems" is also the problem that the "classical" school defined as "coordination through hierarchy". The task of coordinating the activities of the organization is inextricably linked with the existence of various divisions in it, with the differentiation of functions, and specialization. Supporters of the systems approach fully recognize the importance of this "classical" principle.
Simon emphasizes the importance of centralized decision making as a means of coordination, professional competence and responsibility. At the same time, he also points out some disadvantages of centralization, manifested in the delay in decision-making, "blockage of communication channels", distraction of top management's attention from important issues to insignificant ones, etc. The most significant disadvantage of centralization, Simon and March, consider its dysfunctional effects on motivation. Since motivation is determined by many factors besides the system and leadership, the “predominance of power ties” and the “lack of tangible participation” of the members of the organization in decision-making have, according to both sociologists, a significant dysfunctional effect on the behavior of people in the organization and on their attitude towards it.
From Simon's point of view, the problems of centralization and decentralization do not exist independently of the decision-making process. Making decisions relating to the organization as a whole reflects the essence of centralized leadership. Since every decision maker has only "bounded rationality", i.e. “limited by their unconscious skills, habits, and reflexes… by their values and concept of purpose, which may be at odds with the goals of the organization… (as well as) by their degree of knowledge and information,” then subordinates are probably less so than managers are able to make rational decisions from the point of view of the whole system.
When determining the level of decision-making, Simon notes the importance of taking into account such a factor as the correspondence of this level from the point of view of the formal system to the level of "group values", "group social environment". Another criterion for determining the place of the decision-making process in the organization, Simon calls the compliance of this level with the availability of the necessary information and the rational coordination of certain functions.
Considering the prospects for the development of management organization in the light of the ever-wider application of economic and mathematical methods and the use of computer technology, supporters of this direction sought to foresee the impact of such innovations on "human relations". Simon believes that although the new management technique strengthens centralization, it nevertheless significantly changes its forms in comparison with traditional methods, since under the new conditions centralization acquires an impersonal character. Moreover, the comprehensive mechanization and automation of certain managerial functions will contribute, according to Simon, to a change in the nature of the work of middle managers, both in terms of its streamlining on the basis of centralization, and in terms of doing this in the most favorable way (leveling the oppositely directed influences that are usually experienced by this management, and thereby providing a healthier psychological environment).
So, Simon sees organizations as systems in which people are "decision-making mechanisms." The personal and common goals of the members of the organization are optimally identical and motivated by the desire to contribute to the effectiveness of the organization. Simon believes that the division of the organization into divisions should be based on the types of decisions that will be made, and the main criterion for evaluating the structure should be its impact on behavior.
- Simon's differences with Veblen and Bernard
In fact, continuing the criticism of T. Veblen, Simon criticized the theory of the maximizing behavior of consumers and firms. In a real economy, people behave differently, and this is due to two features of their thinking.
1. There is a certain level of aspirations that a person considers satisfactory for himself, and to which he aspires. If he cannot reach it for some time, this level is revised downward. If this does not happen, then an emotional exit begins - apathy, aggression, etc. Thus, consumers strive for some satisfactory state, and firms strive for some satisfactory level of sales or profits. Not maximization, but satisfaction - this is the principle of the consumer or manager.
etc.................
SIMON, HERBERT ALEXANDER(Simon, Herbert Alexander) (1916-2001), an American scientist who studied the principles and processes of decision-making in various fields of human activity and received fundamental results in many exact and human sciences - from mathematics and economics, where his contribution was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 Prize, to psychology and artificial intelligence. Simon was born on June 15, 1916 in Milwaukee (Wisconsin) in the family of an electrical engineer. From 1933 to 1936 he studied at the University of Chicago, majoring in political science, but also studied economics, logic, physics and biophysics; among his immediate teachers were R. Carnap and G. Lasswell. In the next few years he was engaged in research on the activities of municipal authorities, in 1939-1942 he led a research group at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1943 he received a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago. Upon completion of his research grant at Berkeley, he returned to the Lake District, where he worked at the Illinois Institute of Technology and regularly participated in the seminars of the "incubator" of Nobel laureates, the Coles Commission on Economic Research, which was based at the time at the University of Chicago.
In 1947, the first of Simon's classic books came out of print - Administrative behavior (Administrative Behavior, 4th ed. 1997). In addition to exploring the principles of how organizations function, it outlined the concept of "bounded rationality" (bounded rationality), which, three decades later, brought Simon the Nobel Prize. The idea of "limited rationality" does not belong to the economic, but to the socio-psychological and even anthropological field and lies in the fact that when searching for and making a decision, a person in many, but under certain conditions and in most cases, does not strive for the best solution, but is limited to the first one. , albeit not an optimal satisfactory solution.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Simon participated in the creation of the Office for Economic Cooperation, which coordinated the Marshall Plan (later this office was transformed into international organization economic cooperation and development), and was also engaged in the economic justification for the development of nuclear energy and research in the field of mathematical economics.
In 1949, Simon became a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he helped found the School of Industrial Management. At the Carnegie Institute (since 1967 - Carnegie Mellon University) all his further scientific life; together with A. Newell, the scientist played a big role in the transformation of this initially little-known educational institution to a prestigious university and one of the leading American and world centers of computer science, directly participating in the creation of the School of Informatics and the Department of Psychology.
Remaining committed to introducing exact methods into the social sciences, at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, Simon came to the conclusion that it was expedient to study search and decision-making processes by computer simulation. In 1952 he met A. Newell at the RAND Corporation. At first, based on the ideas of A. Turing and K. Shannon, they became interested in creating a program for playing chess, and a little later they set out to model a person's ability to prove logical and mathematical theorems. This task, which Rand J. ("Cliff") Shaw, a systems programmer, joined in, was quickly solved. The Logic Theorist model was created in December 1955 (Newell had moved to Pittsburgh by that time, while remaining a RAND employee), in the summer of 1956 it was implemented in the form of a computer program, and on September 11, 1956 the model was reported at a symposium on information theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subsequently, Simon and Newell, with the participation of Shaw, developed a number of other programs that modeled such types of human activity, which were considered obviously intellectual. They also returned to creating a chess program, but the main product was the "General Problem Solver" (General Problem Solver), which embodied the general model of problem solving. In 1972, when artificial intelligence was a recognized discipline, the results of this period were summarized in the book by Newell and Simon Human problem solving (Human Problem Solving).
The work of Simon and Newell in the 1950s had an extremely important impact on the development of computer science and computer technology. They set the so-called symbolic information processing paradigm, which is based on the hypothesis that human thinking is most adequately modeled as basically a sequential and algorithmic operation with some symbols that somehow reflect reality. Human thinking is provided by the action of one of the varieties of what Simon and Newell called the material symbol system (physical symbol system), at a certain level of consideration, fundamentally identical for humans and computers (this thesis is called a computer metaphor, or the concept of incorporeal intelligence).
When artificial intelligence realized in the 1970s that in real thought processes essential role, as well as general principles thinking also play specific knowledge, the semantic structure of natural language has come to be considered as one of the sources of this knowledge. Thus, Simon, in a huge creative heritage which there were practically no actual linguistic works, for several decades determined the productive interaction between linguists and representatives of computer science.
In the late 1950s, Simon continued to focus on economics and management theory, publishing books Organizations (Organizations, 1958, together with J. March) and The New Science of Management Decisions (The New Science of Management Decision, 1960), but since the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, the problems of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and later also logic, methodology and psychology of science began to occupy an increasingly significant place in his research. The beginning of this shift, which Simon himself saw as a perfectly logical development of his interest in decision-making processes and his personal contribution to their scientific study, was laid by the book Human Models (Models of Man, 1957). In 1969, the first edition of Simon's book was published. Artificial Sciences (The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd ed. 1996, Russian per. 1972), which examined in detail the epistemological functions of computer modeling as a research method; this book remains one of the main methodological works on "computer science" to this day.
In 1979 Simon published the first and in 1989 the second volume. Thinking patterns (Models of Thought). In the early 1980s, within the framework of his concept of artificial sciences, he substantiated the status of a new scientific discipline- cognitive science that emerged as a theoretical component of artificial intelligence and at the same time an interdisciplinary synthesis of the sciences of human thinking. Books were devoted to the interdisciplinary study of scientific discoveries Opening patterns (Models of Discovery, 1977) and co-written Scientific discoveries: computer research of creative processes (Scientific Discoveries: Computational Explorations of Cognitive Processes, 1987). In 1982, works on "bounded rationality" were collected and published ( Models of Bounded Rationality, in 2 volumes), in 1997 the third volume was published.
Pavel Parshin
State educational institution
Higher professional education
"RUSSIAN CUSTOMS ACADEMY"
St. Petersburg named after V.B. Bobkov branch
Department of Customs Economics
ESSAY
discipline: "Institutional economics"
on the topic of: " Herbert Simon and his concept of bounded rationality
Completed by: E.S. Drobakhina, 2nd year student
full-time study of the faculty
economy, group Eb02/1302
Checked by: S.M. Karanets, Associate Professor
St. Petersburg, 2015
Introduction
Chapter 1. Biography
Chapter 2
Conclusion
In modern conditions of a rapidly developing economy, decision-making mechanisms and processes are important aspects not only of the effectiveness of managing an organization, but also of the activity of an individual entity. Moreover, human behavior almost always contains a significant rational component. As a fundamental premise, the thesis is used that it is possible to adapt means to ends, act in accordance with the tasks and prevailing circumstances, choose the best alternative options.
To date, quite a lot of schools have developed that describe the decision-making process in various areas of the economy (most often within organizations and firms, but also in relation to households). One of the most significant among them is behavioral economics. This theory attempts to investigate the real behavior of economic actors and seeks to build a generalized decision-making model. The recognized founder of behavioral economics is Nobel laureate, American economist, professor of psychology and computer science Herbert Simon. Studying the problem of creating scientific foundations managerial behavior and decision-making in large organizations, he devoted his whole life and put a lot of effort to convince his colleagues, other economists, that their idea of "economically thinking person"as a calculator that instantly calculates costs and profits is not true.
The approach developed by G. Simon is applicable in cases where the full application of the rational model is impossible due to lack of time, insufficient initial information or the lack of the possibility of effective processing or analysis of this information (methods, models, staff competencies). In this case, to determine the strategy, not all possible alternatives are considered, but only some (usually relatively small) part of them. At the same time, people do not strive to build an optimal strategy, but try to find some acceptable option - not necessarily optimal, but at the same time, suiting everyone.
The purpose of my work is to study the theory of bounded rationality developed by G. Simon.
Chapter 1. Biography
American political scientist, economist, sociologist and psychologist, professor - primarily at Carnegie Mellon University (Carnegie Mellon University), - whose research has covered many areas, including cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer and systems theory, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology and political science. Simon is the author of nearly a thousand highly acclaimed publications and one of the most influential specialists in the social sciences of the last century. Winner of the Nobel Prize (Nobel Prize) in Economics (1978).
Herbert Alexander Simon was born on June 15, 1916 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), into a Jewish family. His father, an electrical engineer, inventor and owner of several dozen patents, came to the United States from Germany in 1903. Simon's mother was a gifted pianist. Herbert studied at public school which instilled in him an aptitude for science. The boy found his studies entertaining, but very easy. Interest in the study of human behavior appeared in him under the influence of younger brother mother, who studied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Herbert read his uncle's books on economics and psychology as a schoolboy, discovering the field of social sciences. In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago (University of Chicago), where he studied social sciences and mathematics. He was very interested in biology, but due to color blindness and his awkwardness in the laboratory, he did not dare to take it up, preferring to focus on political science and economics. In 1936, Simon received a bachelor's degree, and in 1943 he defended his doctoral thesis on organizational decision making at the same University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell and Charles Edward Merriam.
From 1939 to 1942, Simon was director of research at the University of California at Berkeley (University of California, Berkeley), and when the grant ended, he moved to the faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Institute of Technology), where he taught political science from 1942 to 1949 and also chaired the department. Returning to Chicago, the young scientist began a deeper study of economics in the field of institutionalism. In 1949, Simon became professor of administration and head of the department of industrial management at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later to become Carnegie Mellon University), and continued to use the breadth of his scientific interests to teach at various departments of the university until his death. Simon died on February 9, 2001, at the age of 84, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).
Simon was a polymath who rightfully occupied a place among the Founding Fathers of several important scientific branches who studied the problems of artificial intelligence, information processing, decision making, problem solving, economics of attention, organization theory, complex systems and computer simulation scientific discovery. He was the first to introduce such concepts as "bounded rationality" (bounded rationality) and "satisficing" (satisficing), the first to analyze the nature of organized complexity and proposed a mechanism of "preferential attachment" (preferential attachment) to explain the distribution of power dependence.
Chapter 2
Simon began to study industrial organizations, and one of his many findings was evidence that the internal organization of the firm and the decisions it makes about behavior in the external market bear little resemblance to neoclassical theories of "rational" decision-making. In his numerous works after the 1950s. Simon paid close attention to decision-making issues, and eventually put forward a theory of behavior based on "bounded rationality". He argued that workers face the uncertainty of the future and the uncertainty of the costs of obtaining information in the present. Thus, these two factors limit the ability of workers to make fully rational decisions. Simon argued that they can only make "boundedly rational" decisions, and are forced to make decisions according to not "maximization", but only "satisfaction", that is, setting a certain level at which they will be completely satisfied, and if it is impossible to achieve this level, they will either lower the level of their claims, or change their mind. These "rules of thumb" determine the greatest results that can be achieved in the "limited" and uncertain real world.
In the books "Models of Man" (1957), "Organization" (1958), "The New Science of Management Decision Making" (1960), G. Simon deepens the theories put forward in the "Administrative Introduction", coming to the conclusion that in the classical theory of acceptance decisions lack one important element that takes into account the behavioral and cognitive qualities of people who collect, process information and make decisions. In addition, he drew attention to the fact that a person's memory, his ability to calculate is limited, and this prevents them from absolutely rational behavior and making perfect decisions. Later, G. Simon developed these ideas in the fundamental works "Models of discovery and other topics in scientific methods" (1977), "Models of thinking" (1979), "Models of bound rationality" (1982, in 2 volumes), "Mind in human activities" (1983), "Models of man: social and rational" (1987). Here his research converged with that of others, which together gave rise to the collective concept of "limited" or "bound rationality." In general, as G. Simon himself noted, he always preferred to adhere to "two guiding principles." First, to strive for greater "rigor" of the social sciences, making efforts to better equip them with the tools necessary to solve the problems facing them. Secondly, "to promote close interaction between natural and social scientists so that they can share their special knowledge and skills in solving those diverse and complex issues public policy which requires both types of wisdom."
Simon's services to world science have been crowned with many awards:
· the 1975 Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human perception, and list processing" from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); · the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics for "pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations"; · US National Medal of Science 1986; · 1993 American Psychological Association (APA) "outstanding contribution to psychology" award. Chapter 3
In 1978, Herbert Simon received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theoretical contributions to the science of control, the theory of bounded rationality. Since the end of the 40s. Herbert Simon introduced the concept of the so-called "bounded rationality" into scientific circulation. The concept of "bounded rationality" refers to the purposeful actions of a political or economic entity, carried out by him in conditions where the adoption of the most effective decisions is difficult due to lack of time, information, and insufficient resources. The concept of limited reality proposed by G. Simon is based on three premises: Political or economic actors are limited in their ability to set goals and calculate the long-term consequences of their decisions, both due to their mental abilities and the complexity of the environment that surrounds them. Political or economic entities are trying to realize their goals and solve the tasks assigned to them not all at once, but sequentially. Political or economic actors set themselves goals of a certain level - lower than the maximum possible for them (for example, many business owners do not at all seek to maximize the income of their firm. Instead, they try to bring their own income to a level that would allow them to take the desired social status, and, having achieved the goal, stop). In other words, individuals in their behavior are guided by the principle of satisfaction. Analyzing the problem of how a person constructs a model of a rational system, G. Simon deepens the theory and, on its basis, proceeds to the conclusion about the limitations of human intelligence. The limitation that G. Simon gives to the human mind as its inherent property, on the contrary, is the limitation consciously implemented by an economic subject, taking into account the index of time and available information. As a result, from the point of view of G. Simon, the rationality of the subject is limited because he cannot play the role of an "absolute calculator". On the other hand, if the restrictions within which the economic entity is located are very weak, then a spectrum of positive solutions immediately arises, and the problem becomes the problem of the optimal choice from the spectrum of these solutions. If we maximize the objective function, then we will immediately have the classical concept of economic rationality. If, however, the restrictions themselves are chosen in such a way that the solution is unique, then the natural question is to determine those restrictions that do not imply an appeal to such an economic reality. Thus, G. Simon actually creates a kind of illusion of solving the problem within the framework of his concept, transferring the same problem to the area of choice of restrictions, which, in his opinion, is the final stage of this concept. However, the solution does not appear to be adequate in an explicit form, since the problem of choosing constraints is not final, but, on the contrary, central; that is, voluntarily or involuntarily, G. Simon rearranges the priorities in his concept. simon concept bounded rationality Conclusion
According to G. Simon, the most famous adherent of the concept of bounded rationality, in real conditions of uncertainty and limited time, when making a decision, a person does not try to implement the best option that maximizes its utility, but searches until the first acceptable (satisfactory) one is found. option. Therefore, in principle, people do not maximize, but determine an acceptable level of satisfaction ("aspiration level"). If this level is reached, then they stop the process of looking for other alternatives. It is easy to see that the choice of a satisfactory option requires the economic subject to be much less informed and counting tools than in the neoclassical model. In other words, it is not necessary for an economic entity to have complete and accurate information about the outcome of a given option and compare it with the outcomes of alternative options within the framework of common function usefulness, just a subconscious, intuitive idea that this option is above or below an acceptable level of satisfaction is sufficient. List of sources used
1.Simon G. Rationality as a process and product of thinking // THESIS Vol. 3. 1993. 2.Blaug M.100 great economists after Keynes. Per. under the editorship of Storchevy. - St. Petersburg: School of Economics, 2008. - 384 p. 3.http://gallery. economicus.ru/cgi-bin/frame_rightn. pl? type=in&links=. /in/simon/brief/simon_b1. txt&img=brief. gif&name=simon
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William Procter Award for Scientific Achievement (1980)
Gibbs Lecture (1984)
US National Medal of Science (1986)
Harold Pender Award (1987)
Von Neumann Theoretical Prize (1988)
Herbert Alexander Simon(English) Herbert A. Simon; June 15, Milwaukee - February 9, Pittsburgh) - American scholar in the field of social, political and economic sciences, one of the developers of the Newell - Simon hypothesis .
Biography
Father of Jewish origin, mother with Jewish, Lutheran and Catholic roots.
In 1936 he received a bachelor's degree, and in 1943 a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago, which was also his first place of work as a research assistant (1936-1938). From 1942 he was a lecturer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and in 1947 he became a professor of political science there. In 1949 he began teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, first as professor of management and psychology (1949-1955), then professor of computer science and psychology. He held his last position until his retirement in 1988.
Scientific creativity
He had a noticeable influence on the development of the theory of organization, management and managerial decisions. His work in the field of computer technology and artificial intelligence had a significant impact on the development of cybernetics.
The main efforts of G. Simon were directed to the fundamental studies of organizational behavior and decision-making processes. Rightfully considered one of the founders modern theory managerial decisions (theory of bounded rationality). The main results obtained by him in this area are presented in such books as "Organizations"(together with James March), published in 1958, as well as "Administrative Conduct" and "The New Science of Management Decisions" ().
G. Simon's significant theoretical contribution to the science of management received worthy recognition in 1978, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for innovative research on the decision-making process in economic organizations, in firms."
Herbert Simon did not read newspapers or watch TV, because he believed that if something really important happened, someone would definitely tell him about it, so do not waste time on the media.
Bibliography
- "Administrative Behavior" (Administrative Behavior, 1947);
- "Models of Man" (Models of Man, 1957).
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Notes
Literature
- Blaug M. Simon, Herbert // 100 great economists since Keynes = Great Economists since Keynes: An introduction to the lives & works of one hundred great economists of the past. - St. Petersburg. : Economics, 2009. - S. 252-255. - 384 p. - (The School of Economics Library, issue 42). - 1,500 copies. - ISBN 978-5-903816-03-3.
- (English) . - article from Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved June 13, 2014.
Links
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