Herbert A. Simon on What Ails Business Schools: More than ‘A Problem in Organizational Design’

The Rhetorical Dimensions of Bounded Rationality: Herbert A. Simon and Organizational Economics

I discuss the rhetorical dimensions of bounded rationality in two different, yet related, contexts, namely in the practice of organizational economists and in Herbert Simon’s key attempts to persuade economists to take bounded rationality seriously, his Ely lecture and his Nobel Prize lecture. I discuss various reasons why Simon failed to convince his contemporaries, among other things, the abs...

What ails health care

More than a gut feeling: Ensuring your inter-organizational business model works

We present an approach, called BIZ2BIS (from Business Models to the Blueprint of the Information System), to help design, discuss, and evaluate inter-organizational business models without a central point of authority, and also derive high-level requirements for their underlying IS. Its iterative and incremental nature enables the identification of attractive value propositions for all particip...

Herbert Simon. Artificial intelligence as a framework for understanding intuition

Herbert Simon made overlapping substantive contributions to the fields of economics, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, decision theory, and organization theory. Simon s work was motivated by the belief that neither the human mind, human thinking and decision making, nor human creativity need be mysterious. It was after he helped create ‘‘thinking’’ machines that Simon came...

Multidisciplinary creativity: the case of Herbert A. Simon

In the twentieth century, no person epitomized more dramatically the “Renaissance mind” than Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001). In a working life spanning over 60 years, Simon made seminal contributions to administrative theory, axiomatic foundations of physics, economics, sociology, econometrics, cognitive psychology, logic of scientific discovery, and artificial intelligence. Simon’s life of the m...