Jones 2002

Policy Sciences 35: 269^284, 2002. ß 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Bounded rationality and public policy: Herbert A. Simon and the decisional foundation of collective choice1
BRYAN D. JONES
Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle, U.S.A.

Abstract. By 1958, a model of human behavior capable of serving as the micro-level foundation for organizational and policy studies was in place, due primarily to the e¡orts of Herbert Simon, organization theorist James March, and computer scientist Allen Newell. Yet the fundamentals of that model, the behavioral model of choice, to this date have not been fully incorporated into policy studies and organizational analyses. The ‘Simon program’ remains incomplete. Much analysis continues to rely on thick or thin models of rational maximization. As is well-known, the behavioral model of choice links to organizational processes better than rational actor assumptions. But the behavioral model of choice also predicts distributions of organizational and policy outputs in a superior fashion, and need not draw in extraneous descriptive facets of human behavior to the analysis. As Herb Simon did beginning in 1945 until his death in 2001, I continue to advocate a solid behavioral base for the analysis of political and economic systems.

Introduction
Public policies are binding, authoritative collective choices. The study of public policy addresses how the thoughts and actions of people are translated into such collective decisions, and how those decisions impact the collectivity. So the study of public policies must address, directly or indirectly, issues in human cognition. Most of us studying public policy, whether in a theoretical or applied vein, care little about the ¢ne details of the speci¢cs of human cognition; we are quite content to leave that to biologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists. What we do need, however, is a model of the bases of human behavior in

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