Herbert Alexander Simon was an economist, political scientist and cognitive psychologist, whose primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and is best known for the theories of Bounded Rationality and Satisficing. Herbert Alexander Simon received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and the Turing Award in 1975. His research spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001. Herbert Alexander Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.
Simon received his B.A. and his Ph.D. in political
science from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell,
Nicolas Rashevsky, Rudolf Carnap, Henry Schultz, and Charles Edward Merriam.
After enrolling in a course on "Measuring Municipal Governments," Simon became a
research assistant for Clarence Ridley, and co-authored Measuring Municipal
Activities: A Survey of Suggested Criteria for Appraising Administration in
1938. Simon's studies led him to the field of organizational decision-making,
which became the subject of his doctoral dissertation.
From 1949 to 2001,
Herbert Alexander Simon was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University, in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1949, Simon became a professor of administration
and chairman of the Department of Industrial Management at Carnegie Institute of
Technology, which became Carnegie-Mellon University. Simon later also taught
psychology and computer science in the same university.
Herbert Alexander Simon became best known for his theory
of corporate decision in his book Administrative Behavior. He based his concepts
with an approach that recognized multiple factors that contribute to decision
making. His organization and administration interest played a big part in the
creation of the Economic Cooperation Administration in 1948, administrative team
that administered aid to the Marshall Plan for the U.S. government, serving on
President Lyndon Johnson's Science Advisory Committee, and also the National
Academy of Science.
Administrative Behavior was first published in 1947
was based on Simon's doctoral dissertation. It served as the foundation for his
life's work. The centerpiece of this book is the behavioral and cognitive
processes of humans making rational decisions. By his definition, an operational
administrative decision should be correct, efficient, and practical to implement
with a set of coordinated means.
Herbert Alexander Simon recognized that
a theory of administration is largely a theory of human decision making, and as
such must be based on both economics and on psychology. He states: [If] there
were no limits to human rationality administrative theory would be barren. It
would consist of the single precept: Always select that alternative, among those
available, which will lead to the most complete achievement of your goals.
Contrary to the "homo economicus" stereotype, Simon
argued that alternatives and consequences may be partly known, and means and
ends imperfectly differentiated, incompletely related, or poorly detailed.
Herbert Alexander Simon followed Chester Barnard, who stated "the decisions
that an individual makes as a member of an organization are quite distinct from
his personal decisions". Personal choices may be determined whether an
individual joins a particular organization and continue to be made in his or her
extra–organizational private life. As a member of an organization, however, that
individual makes decisions not in relationship to personal needs and results,
but in an impersonal sense as part of the organizational intent, purpose, and
effect. Organizational inducements, rewards, and sanctions are all designed to
form, strengthen, and maintain this identification.
Simon was a pioneer
in the field of artificial intelligence, creating with Allen Newell the Logic
Theory Machine and the General Problem Solver programs. General Problem Solver
may possibly be the first method developed for separating problem solving
strategy from information about particular problems. Both programs were
developed using the Information Processing Language (IPL) (1956) developed by
Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Simon. Donald Knuth mentions the development of list
processing in IPL, with the linked list originally called "NSS memory" for its
inventors.
In the early 1960s psychologist Ulric Neisser asserted that
while machines are capable of replicating "cold cognition" behaviors such as
reasoning, planning, perceiving, and deciding, they would never be able to
replicate "hot cognition" behaviors such as pain, pleasure, desire, and other
emotions. Simon responded to Neisser's views in 1963 by writing a paper on
emotional cognition, which he updated in 1967 and published in Psychological
Review.
Simon was interested in how humans learn and, with Edward
Feigenbaum, he developed the EPAM (Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer) theory,
one of the first theories of learning to be implemented as a computer program.
EPAM was able to explain a large number of phenomena in the field of verbal
learning.
Simon has been credited for revolutionary changes in
microeconomics. He is responsible for the concept of organizational
decision-making as it is known today. He was the first to rigorously examine how
administrators made decisions when they did not have perfect and complete
information. It was in this area that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978.