Контрольная работа № 2. Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive

Herbert Simon

Text V.

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science sociology and was a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century.

Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15, 1916. He was educated as a child in the public school system in Milwaukee where he developed an interest in science. In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and following those early influences, he studied the social sciences and mathematics. His most important mentor at the University was Henry Schultz who was an econometrician and mathematical economist. Eventually his studies led him to the field of organizational decision making which would become the subject of his doctoral dissertation.

From 1939 to 1942, Simon acted as director of a research group at the University of California, Berkeley. When the group’s grant was exhausted, he took a position in political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. From 1950 to 1955, Simon studied mathematical economics.

Herbert Simon has been credited for revolutionary changes in microeconomics. He is responsible for the concept of organizational decision-making as it is known today. While this notion was not entirely new, Simon is best known for its origination. It was in this area that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978.

Simon’s main goal was to link economic theory to mathematics and statistics. His main contributions were to the fields of general equilibrium and econometrics.

Simon was known for his research on industrial organization. He determined that the internal organization of firms and the external business decisions thereof did not conform to the Neoclassical theories of “rational” decision-making. Simon wrote many articles on the topic over the course of his life mainly focusing on the issue of decision-making within the behavior of what he termed “bounded rationality.” The term bounded rationality is used to designate rational choice that takes into account the cognitive limitations of both knowledge and cognitive capacity. Bounded rationality is a central theme in behavioral economics. It is concerned with the ways in which the actual decision-making process influences decisions. Theories of bounded rationality relax one or more assumptions of standard expected utility theory”.

Simon's genius and influence is evidenced by the many top-level honors he received later in life. These include: the ACM's Turing Award for making "basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing." (1975); the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978); the National Medal of Science (1986); and the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1993).

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