What Simon says

This paper provides an overview of the work of Herbert Simon and his ideas about
rational decision making. By his own standards, Simon is an economist who works in
the tradition of Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The central theme in Simon’s
research is how human beings organize themselves in different structures of
distributed decision making in order to achieve a degree of rationality that is higher
than which can be attained by the individual. In this realm his main preoccupation are
hierarchic organizations such as the business firm and the computer. Simon sharply
contrasts his views with the EUT, the dominant view on rational decision making in
economics and other social sciences.