mega city-regions or metropolitan regions- that was introduced for the first time in a cabinet article in 1995- are becoming a dominant form of human settlements both in developed and developing countries. despite of all contentious discussion on economic and demographic significance of metropolitan regions and so rationality of establishing a distinct structure for their effective management a...

Herbert Simon was the apostle of bounded rationality. He very often illustrated bounded rationality in the context of the theory of the firm, and was, of course, a major contributor to organizational theory. However, in spite of Simon s efforts, I argue that bounded rationality has been only incompletely absorbed in the economics of organization, is little used for substantive purposes, and mos...

Atheists sometimes use Bertrand Russell’s teapot argument, and its variants with other objects in place of the teapot, to argue for the rationality of atheism. In this paper I show that this use of the teapot argument and its variants is unacceptably circular. The circularity arises because there is indirect evidence against the objects invoked in the arguments.

In a recent paper, Samir Okasha presented an argument that suggests that there is no rational way to choose among scientific theories. This would seriously undermine the view that science is a rational entreprise. In this paper I show how a suitably nuanced view of what scientific rationality requires allows us to avoid Okasha’s conclusion. I go on to argue that making further assumptions about...

In this essay, we argue that rational choice (RC) provides an inadequate foundation for a theory of economic action. After defining RC sufficiently broadly to encompass much of the bounded rationality literature as well as neoclassical optimization theory, we present three principal arguments against RC. The first is cognitive: economic actors are experts at what they do, and the cognitive proc...

Herbert Simon was the apostle of bounded rationality. He very often illustrated bounded rationality in the context of the theory of the firm, and was, of course, a major contributor to organizational theory. However, in spite of Simon’s efforts, I argue that bounded rationality has been only incompletely absorbed in the economics of organization, is little used for substantive purposes, and mos...

Large scientific facilities in all domains of science, are looking at cooperation between science and the industry to alleviate their increasing financial constraints, as proprietary research proposals are charged a price for the time-use of the facility. We argue that present practices to determine those prices are completely ad hoc and thus, not based in any economic rationality. This paper p...

Rationality is a fundamental concept in economics. Most researchers will accept that human beings are not fully rational. Herbert Simon suggested that we are “bounded rational”. However, it is very difficult to quantify “bounded rationality”, and therefore it is difficult to pinpoint its impact to all those economic theories that depend on the assumption of full rationality. Ariel Rubinstein pr...

Information systems research and practice have been developed under the combination of scientific and economic reasoning that forms the bedrock of western modernity. Alternative ways of perceiving the value of technical innovation, often manifested in the deployment of ICT in the social context of developing countries, are poorly understood and tend to be dismissed as ‘irrational’. In this pape...