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In Bounded Rationality and Politics, Jonathan Bendor considers two schools of behavioral economics-the first guided by Tversky and Kahneman's work on heuristics and biases, which focuses on the mistakes people make in judgment and choice; the second as described by Gerd Gigerenzer's program on fast and frugal heuristics, which emphasizes the effectiveness of simple rules of thumb. Finding each of these radically incomplete, Bendor's illuminating analysis proposes Herbert Simon's pathbreaking work on bounded rationality as a way to reconcile the inconsistencies between the two camps. Bendor sho

In Bounded Rationality and Politics, Jonathan Bendor considers two schools of behavioral economics--the first guided by Tversky and Kahneman's work on heuristics and biases, which focuses on the mistakes people make in judgment and choice; the second as described by Gerd Gigerenzer's program on fast and frugal heuristics, which emphasizes the effectiveness of simple rules of thumb. Finding each of these radically incomplete, Bendor's illuminating analysis proposes Herbert Simon's pathbreaking work on bounded rationality as a way to reconcile the inconsistencies between the two camps. Bendor sho.

"This paper proposes a model in which the decision maker builds an optimally simplified representation of the world which is "sparse," i.e., uses few parameters that are non-zero. Sparsity is formulated so as to lead to well-behaved, convex maximization problems. The agent's choice of a representation of the world features a quadratic proxy for the benefits of thinking and a linear formulation for the costs of thinking. The agent then picks the optimal action given his representation of the world. This model yields a tractable procedure, which embeds the traditional rational agent as a particular case, and can be used for analyzing classic economic questions under bounded rationality. For instance, the paper studies how boundedly rational agents select a consumption bundle while paying imperfect attention to prices, and how frictionless firms set prices optimally in response. This leads to a novel mechanism for price rigidity. The model is also used to examine boundedly rational intertemporal consumption problems and portfolio choice with imperfect understanding of returns"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

How would a boundedly rational agent react to a larger menu? I model choice from an unobservable, subjective consideration subset. Consideration sets satisfy Sen's property alpha: larger objective choice sets can generate smaller consideration sets. The contribution of this paper is a representation of choice among menus: choice sets are only as valuable as the best item in their subjective subsets, so larger sets can be worse. Unlike people facing temptation, a boundedly rational decision maker can strictly prefer both of two choice sets to their union. This model of intertemporal choice reflects how an agent who satisfies Weak WARP would choose, if sophisticated about her bounded rationality.

Established environmental policy theory is based on the assumption of homo economicus. This means that people are seen as fully rational and acting in a self-regarding manner. In line with this, economics emphasizes efficient policy solutions and the associated advantages of price incentives. Behavioral economics offers alternative, more realistic views on individual behavior. In this paper we investigate opportunities to integrate bounded rationality and other-regarding preferences into environmental policy theory to arrive at recommendations for more effective policies. For this purpose, we will address decisions made under risk and uncertainty, intertemporal choice, decision heuristics, other-regarding preferences, heterogeneity, evolutionary selection of behaviors, and the role of happiness. Three aspects of environmental policy are considered in detail, namely sustainable consumption, environmental valuation and policy design. We pay special attention to the role of non-pecuniary, informative instruments and illustrate the implications for climate policy. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Why do very different countries often emulate the same policy model? Two years after Ronald Reagan's income-tax simplification of 1986, Brazil adopted a similar reform even though it threatened to exacerbate income disparity and jeopardize state revenues. And Chile's pension privatization of the early 1980s has spread throughout Latin America and beyond even though many poor countries that have privatized their social security systems, including Bolivia and El Salvador, lack some of the preconditions necessary to do so successfully. In a major step beyond conventional rational-choice accounts of policy decision-making, this book demonstrates that bounded rationality drives the spread of innovations across countries. When seeking solutions to domestic problems, decision-makers often consider foreign models, sometimes promoted by development institutions like the World Bank. But, as Kurt Weyland argues, policymakers apply inferential shortcuts at the risk of distortions and biases. Through an analysis of pension and health reform in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru, Weyland demonstrates that decision-makers are captivated by neat, bold, cognitively available models. And rather than thoroughly assessing the costs and benefits of external models, they draw excessively firm conclusions from limited data and overextrapolate from spurts of success or failure. Indications of initial success can thus trigger an upsurge of policy diffusion. --From publisher's description