🧮A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice

A real chooser cannot do what economic theory asks of it: see every option, know every outcome and compute the best. So it does something simpler that is still sensible. It sorts outcomes into good enough and not, meets its options one at a time, and takes the first that clears the bar. The bar moves: up when acceptable options turn out to be easy to find, down when they do not.

Rationality, on this account, belongs to the procedure given the limits of the one running it, and not to the result.

• Read on Saturday 26 July and Sunday morning, the weekend the low weeks began to lift. Hard going. The idea is worth it.
• Twenty pages, about eight of them set theory. I read every line of the prose and let the notation wash over me, so this note is kept thin on purpose: what I understood, and no more.
• I had been using the word satisficing for months, including in an issue in May. I went to the source to check, and the word is not in it. He coined it a year later, in a follow-up. This is the paper with the idea and without the name.
• The idea: the perfectly rational chooser of the textbooks needs information and computing power that no living thing has. Real choosers set a bar, look until something clears it, and stop.
• Four stars for the idea and two for the afternoon.
• My notes are in 📖 Simon on satisficing. The term as taught is 🧩 Satisficing, and my one-line version is 🔤 Satisfice. More on him in 🏛️ Herbert A. Simon.