Abstract
Economic theory has been dominated by a description of iinn-behaviour that abstracts from almost ail real-life features with which managers are familiar: fundamental uncertainty, complexity, and the necessity of making decisions with limited information and calculating capacity. Actual business-practice, as many observers have pointed out, provides a rather conflicting viewpoint: firms often rely on rather simple rules of thumb or routines, rather than explicit optimization procedures. That is. they are boundedly rational in the sense of Simon (19S6a,b). Or. they base their decisions on whims or impulses (hat defy any rational explication, dial is, diey display what Keynes termed animal spirits.
The research of Bart Verspagen has been made possible by a fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Silverberg, G., Verspagen, B. (1997). The Selection of Behavioral Conventions in an Evolutionary Model of Economic Dynamics. In: Fang, F., Sanglier, M. (eds) Complexity and Self-Organization in Social and Economic Systems. Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, vol 449. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-48406-3_16
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