Objectives

The Summer School “Bounded Rationality – Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory” will bring together young researchers across the social sciences to seek a common understanding of how humans make decisions. Bounded rationality is the key to understanding how people reason when not all alternatives and consequences are known and the future is uncertain. Whereas logic and probability theory assume perfect knowledge about the relevant features of the world, bounded rationality seeks to specify simple step-by-step rules (heuristics) that function well in an uncertain world in which search, information, and time are limited.

An essential idea underlying the concept of bounded rationality is that decision mechanisms are adapted to the environment. The study of ecological rationality explores how these mechanisms exploit the structure of the information in the environment. Through evolution, learning, and culture, a repertoire of specialized cognitive mechanisms—an "adaptive toolbox" of heuristics—has emerged. These fast and frugal heuristics generally consist of three building blocks: search rule, stopping rule, and decision making.

The Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality 2012 will have a focus on decision making in the wild. Formal decision making theory is an abstact construct of great internal coherence which however often lacks correspondence to real world problems. In contrast, the study bounded rationality focuses on well defined real world environments and examines how cognition and more specifically heuristics can adapt to them. This often requires going beyond the lab into the wild to study problems that occur in medicine, law, business and politics into the field.

The aim of the Summer Institute is to provide a platform to discuss the role of heuristics in real world decision making contexts. Participants will be introduced to the sometimes surprisingly different research practices of many neighboring fields: psychology, economics, biology, and philosophy. Workshops, talks, poster presentations, and informal events will enable participants to share knowledge beyond disciplinary boundaries, while challenging the reigning assumptions in the individual disciplines.