This important collection examines the subject of cognitive economics - an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human problem solving, choice, decision making and change which explains economic transactions and the nature and evolution of organisations and institutions in an environment of structural uncertainty, scarcity and incentives. Cognitive economics is strongly linked with many other disciplines concerning choice, such as cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and the science of administration. This new approach is contributing to a wide range of economic fields such as consumer theory, economics of the firm, economics of innovation and evolutionary economics. These path-breaking volumes will be an indispensable tool for new research in the field of cognitive economics, and of particular interest to scholars of economics, psychology and philosophy.

The purpose of this book is to publish the ideas of the late Herbert Simon and sympathetic economists, on the subject of bounded rationality, economics, cognitive science and related disciplines, and to reprint some of Professor Simon's classic papers which have appeared in journals not widely read by economists. Not only on account of his Nobel Prize in Economics, but also because of the widespread applications of his ideas and theories, it is especially valuable to readers to have a book of this kind at the present time. Currently in this whole field, there is increasing emphasis on computer-related theory building. Herbert Simon, beginning from the time when microcomputers did not exist, was a pioneer of this approach. The book begins with an edited transcript of a colloquium, held between Herbert Simon and a group of Italian economists in Italy in 1988. It continues with the reprinted Simon papers and papers by three scholars, Raymond Boudon, Massimo Egidi and Riccardo Viale coming from different disciplines but holding a common interest in bounded rationality and ends with a response by a sympathetic economist, Robin Marris.