Herbert Alexander Simon 1916-2001, American social scientist and economist, b. Milwaukee, grad. Univ. of Chicago (B.A., 1936, Ph.D., 1943). A professor of computer science and psychology at Carnegie-Mellon Univ. from 1949 until his death, Simon was a pioneer of the development of computer artificial intelligence . In economics, he contended that the theory of "economic man," which argues that the individual invariably chooses a course that will maximize personal benefits, failed to account for the inherent uncertainty of human action. His highly original work on decision-making in such books as Administrative Behavior (1947, 4th ed. 1997), in which he argued that business executives often fail to maximize profits because they make decisions without assessing all information and long-term effects, earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978. Simon's other books include Scientific Discovery (1987).

Herbert Alexander Simon

The study of decision-making behavior, especially in large organizations, led Herbert Simon (born 1916) to develop new theories in economics, psychology, business administration, and other fields. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978. He was also the first social scientist elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. He received an A.B. from the University of Chicago in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1943. He stayed on at Chicago for two years as a research assistant before becoming a staff member of the International City Managers Association and assistant editor of the Public Management and Municipal Year Book (1938-1939). The following year he joined the University of California as director of administrative measurement studies. After a teaching post at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1942-1949), Simon joined the teaching staff of the Carnegie-Mellon University, first as professor of administration and psychology (1949-1955) and later as professor of computer science and psychology (1956 to the mid-1980s).

In his work Simon brought greater realism to neoclassical economic models, which he found to be lacking because of their idealized vision of the "rational" consumer, businessperson, or worker. Instead of maximizing their welfare, profits, or wages on the marketplace, Simon believed that lack of information about alternatives and the impossibility of foreseeing the future makes all of these participants "satisficers." Their rational behavior is "bounded" by the cost of obtaining information and uncertainty; hence Simon proposed the concept of "bounded rationality." That is, economic agents try to do as well as possible given the constraints, but these constraints keep them from ever achieving what neo-classical economists would call a "maximum" (of profits, for example). Simon argues that individuals would be acting rationally by "satisficing," given real world circumstances.

The notion of "bounded rationality" is explained by analogy to the search for a needle in the haystack. The neoclassical approach would be to search for the needle in the stack (a maximization process). Simon's approach is to find the needle which is sharp enough to handle the contemplated sewing tasks (a "satisficing" process).

In another example, consider a chess game: every move involves potentially millions of calculations about alternative actions. Since it is impossible for players to examine all the possibilities, they learn to follow promising lines of play and to utilize "rules of thumb" in decision-making. Over time these rules of thumb change as outcomes are evaluated.

Simon's views on rationality have been expounded in numerous books and articles, including Models of Man (1956), Human Problem Solving (with Allen Newell, 1972), The Sciences of the Artificial (1969), Models of Discovery (1977), and Models of Bounded Rationality and Other Topics in Economic Theory (1982).

Simon also disputes whether economic models centered on "equilibrium" solutions are useful or accurate. The idea of equilibrium derives from the science of mechanics and was adapted to economic problems by neo-classical economists of the late 19th century. Most modern American economists until the mid-1970s also utilized this methodology. Simon, in his Richard T. Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association in 1978, argued that: "when the system is complex and its environment continually changing (that is, in the conditions under which biological and social evolution actually takes place), there is no assurance that the system's momentary position will lie anywhere near a point of equilibrium."

Simon made other significant contributions to economic analysis. The Hawkins-Simon theorem (1949) contains a powerful test for the sustainability of an economy as measured by input-output tables. In the area of production scheduling Simon co-authored the "Certainty Equivalent" theorem (1956, 1960), which provided practical help to businesses concerned with the needs for labor and inventory when demand fluctuates.

In spite of his own mathematical prowess, Simon sought to break economic methodology out of the rigorous mathematical modeling which requires strong assumptions and quantifiable data into a broader arena of qualitative analysis using interdisciplinary theories. Indeed, he believed economists have much to learn from other social sciences and in his own career he drew widely from them. Much of his writing dealt with issues in psychology as applied to organizations, or what Simon called "micro-micro-economics." To promote these views Simon, along with colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon, founded The Journal of Organizational Behavior. Simon's textbook Administrative Behavior was first published in 1947 and became a classic in the field, going through several editions.

Simon was a consultant to the International City Managers Association (1942-1949), the U.S. Bureau of the Budget (1946-1949), the U.S. Census Bureau (1947), and the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics (1947-1960); chairman of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council (1961-1965); member of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee (1969-1971); chairman of the Committee on Air Quality Control of the National Academy of Sciences (1974); chairman of the Committee on Behavioral Sciences of the National Science Foundation; winner of the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions of the American Psychological Association (1969), and Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association (1976). He lectured extensively around the world and received nine honorary degrees.

For his many and diverse contributions Herbert Simon was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1978. Yet the label "economist" is far too narrow for this extraordinary social scientist and philosopher. While not a household name, Simon is still widely-read and has had a profound influence on the underpinnings of nearly every social science. Often referenced in both the abstract as well as the specific, some of Simon's views were discussed in 1996 by Herbert Kaufman in his acceptance of the Dwight Waldo Award of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), of which Simon is a previous recipient.

Further Reading

Further information on Herbert Simon can be found in articles by two leading economists in H. W. Spiegel and W. J. Samuels (editors), Contemporary Economists in Perspective (1984), and Mark Blaug, Great Economists Since Keynes (1985). Simon's own autobiographical work, Models of My Life (1991), received generally favorable reviews. □

Simon, Herbert A.

American Professor of Computer Science and Psychology
1916–2001

Herbert A. Simon combined the study of social and behavioral science with the disciplines of mathematics, physics, and economics in a career that included a longtime focus on the science of decision-making in organizations. Of particular note is his analysis of decision-making and problem-solving, but he was also interested in artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of the computer to study intelligence and cognition, both in problem-solving, such as the discovery of theorems, and in game playing, such as chess.

Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother an accomplished pianist. He enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1933 and graduated in 1936 with a degree in political science. He received his doctorate through the University of Chicago in 1943 while heading a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, between 1939 and 1942. He taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1942 to 1949, and he engaged in research with colleagues at the University of Chicago and the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. His next professional post was at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he helped build the Graduate School of Industrial Administration.

Simon's career in Pittsburgh as an academic, researcher, and author spanned more than fifty years. He was well respected by colleagues and students. He believed that the approach of the "hard" sciences, such as physics and mathematics, could be applied to the behavioral sciences, both in economics and political science, his first field of study, and the behavioral sciences, primarily psychology and cognitive science.

One of Simon's earliest books, published in 1947, was Administrative Behavior. The book was an expansion of his doctoral dissertation, which began his studies of rationality. Later publications include Models of Man (1957), The Sciences of the Artificial (1969), Human Problem Solving, with Allen Newell (1972), and Models of Discovery (1977), among others. In 1991 he published an autobiography, Models of My Life.

Simon firmly believed that the computer could and should aid in the study of human cognition and, ultimately, that what the computer could do in terms of cognition was "think." He considered the computer to be a laboratory for epistemology, the study of knowledge or truth, as well as a tool for investigating the human mind. In 1954 Simon began using computers to model problem-solving.

Simon developed what he termed the theory of "satisficing," that is, the making of decisions on the basis of a satisfactory rather than optimal (absolute best) solution. This is a technique familiar to anyone who has done even such a routine task as develop a schedule of college courses for a term. One must make choices that meet certain requirements for one's degree, balancing other factors such as personal preferences for times of classes, subjects one is interested in, distance to and from classes, and cost to create a satisfactory, albeit possibly imperfect, schedule.

Simon studied "bounded rationality," the theory of making rational decisions under constraints such as a lack of knowledge, computational difficulty, and personal and social circumstances. The decisions are rational, but not in the sense of an all-knowing, infallible optimizer. This leads to finding acceptable, but not necessarily optimal, solutions to problems.

From 1966 until his death on February 9, 2001, Simon was Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 for "pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations." He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1986 and the A.M. Turing Award by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1975, with Allen Newell (1927–1992). He collaborated with Newell and Clifford Shaw to write a computer program, the Logic Theorist, or the Logic Theorem Machine, designed to find logical proofs. Together, the three also collaborated on a software program designed to play chess as a human, not an expert. He was involved in several computer projects to study human cognition and form models of human learning, problem solving, and "thinking" using computer programs.

see also Artificial Intelligence; Chess Playing; Decision Support Systems; Newell, Allen.

Roger R. Flynn

Bibliography

Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Simon, Herbert A. Models of My Life. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Internet Resources

Simon, Herbert A. Autobiography. The Nobel E-Museum. <http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1978/simon-autobio.html>