Bounded Rationality and Politics: Featured Faculty Books: The Library: Stanford GSB

[photo - Jonathan Bendor]

Jonathan Bendor's research focuses on three areas: 1) theories of bounded rationality - how cognitive constraints affect decision making; 2) the evolution of cooperation and of norms of collective action; 3) the study of bureaucracy - institutional methods of easing cognitive constraints faced by individual decision makers. more ...

Faculty Books: Bounded Rationality and Politics

Bounded Rationality and Politics
by Jonathan Bendor
University of California Press, 2010

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 shows that Simon’s theory turns on the interplay between the cognitive constraints of decision makers and the complexity of their tasks.

Selected Reviews

Harvard University

Reviewer: Daniel P. Carpenter

"Bendor's Bounded Rationality and Politics provides an adept and illuminating critique of existing theories while also introducing new models and concepts that are sure to remain part of the conversation for generations to come. This book will reinvigorate the field of political science."

University of Michigan

Reviewer: Scott Page

"Bendor's scholarship is top drawer. Excellent. These essays are not only intellectually deep, but also engaging and powerful."