In a recent chapter in the Elsevier Reference Collection in Social Sciences, KLI postdoctoral fellow Enrico Petracca reconstructs the diverse approaches and meanings of the concept of “bounded rationality” in the cognitive and social science literature. Bounded rationality is typically hard to make sense of because scholars have attributed strikingly different, if not outright opposite, meanings to it. The chapter provides a historical explanation for this variety, identifying its roots in Herbert Simon’s original pluralistic definition of the concept. According to this hypothesis, the post-Simonian approaches can be divided based on the different aspects of Simon’s definition they draw upon. The chapter also emphasizes the descriptive and normative implications of the different approaches.

Publication:
Enrico Petracca (2026) Bounded Rationality: Making Sense of a Concept’s Plurality. Reference Module in Social Sciences. Elsevier. ISBN 9780443157851, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-443-40622-5.00093-1.