Suchergebnisse

During World War II there was a "shotgun wedding" forged in the processes of designing feedback mechanisms used to control gunfire targeting fast-moving enemy aircraft. Hendrik Bode perceived the shotgun marriage as a union of the classic regulator approach and long-distance telephone communications engineering. Norbert Weiner took the wedding description a step further by nesting communication engineering into a statistical mechanics framework in which the information engineer had to filter the useful signal from the useless noise. A main goal in designing weapon-fire control systems was to use negative feedback loops to ensure the stability of a system that was always in a transient mode. In the 1950s, control engineers such as Arnold Tustin, Bill Phillips, and Charles Holt offered their new analytic tools of block diagrams of systems with feedback loops, stability criteria, and physical analogues to model the economy, realize the promise of stability of employment and prices, and avoid another depression similar to that of the 1930s. By the early 1970s Paul Samuelson and the rational expectations theorists were primed to be receptive to a second, Cold War shotgun wedding in control engineering. Richard Bellman described it as a marriage of classical optimization theory and the probabilistic theory of stochastic processes.

In October 1956 the RAND Corporation established the Logistics Systems Laboratory (LSL), with the goal of using simulation to translate the broad findings of normative microeconomics into detailed, implementable procedures for US Air Force operations. The laboratory was housed in the training simulation facilities that had been recently vacated by psychologists working at the RAND Systems Research Laboratory. Economists at the LSL interwove their marginal cost-benefit analysis with the psychologists' focus on process, adaptation, and group behavior. Over a decade, economists and psychologists at the LSL conducted game simulations structured by four separate laboratory problems. Economists went from using simulation to demonstrate the superiority of optimal policies derived from deductive economics to using the experiment as an inductive tool. One concern in this historical case study is with how economics leveraged psychology to grow a regulatory system when individual units pursuing their own interests did not promote the interests of society. This dilemma was one of a few stimuli generating a new focal point for rationality, that of efficient implementation. More recently, economists on the BIS Basel Committee on Banking Supervision engaged in implementation rationality through simulation in the form of the Regulatory Consistency Assessment Programme (RCAP). The examination of iterative modeling and solving for rules of action at the LSL and in the RCAP suggests that the explicit narrowing of modeling choices that would bind the rationality of the individual units would be best iterated through a process that takes into account the human factor. Interactions with experimental psychologists opened a door for economists to nonstandard modeling and an iterative, heuristic specification of economizing rules of action that had a greater chance of implementation.