We came across Herbert Simon recently.
According to Wikipedia he was "not only a polymath, but a truly innovative thinker. He was among the founding fathers of several of today's most important scientific domains, including artificial Intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. He coined the terms bounded rationality and satisficing, and was the first to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions."
He won the Economics Nobel prize in 1978 for his contributions to the decision-making process within economic organizations:
"Simon's work was of the utmost importance for this new line of development. In his epoch-making book, Administrative Behavior (1947), and in a number of subsequent works, he described the company as an adaptive system of physical, personal and social components that are held together by a network of intercommunications and by the willingness of its members to cooperate and to strive towards a common goal. What is new in Simon's ideas is, most of all, that he rejects the assumption made in the classic theory of the firm of an omniscient, rational, profit-maximizing entrepreneur. He replaces this entrepreneur by a number of cooperating decision-makers, whose capacities for rational action are limited, both by a lack of knowledge about the total consequences of their decisions, and by personal and social ties. Since these decision-makers cannot choose the best alternative, as can the classic entrepreneur, they have to be content with a satisfactory alternative. Individual companies, therefore, strive not to maximize profits but to find acceptable solutions to acute problems. This might mean that a number of partly contradictory goals have to be reached at the same time."
Press release and presentation speech from Stockholm.
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