Introduction

JONATHAN BENDOR

There are two main orientations toward bounded rationality (BR) in political science. The first orientation sees the glass as half full, emphasizing that decision makers often manage to do "reasonably well"—even in complex tasks—despite their cognitive limitations. Virtually all of Simon's work and also the theory of "muddling through" (Lindblom 1959; Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963) belong to this branch, which we can call the problem-solving approach. In the second orientation the glass is half empty: the emphasis is on how people make mistakes even in simple tasks. Most of the research on heuristics and biases, following Tversky and Kahneman's pioneering work (1974), belongs here.

Prominent early use of the problem-solving approach can be found in Aaron Wildavsky's studies of budgeting. In, for example, The Politics of the Budgetary Process, he devotes much space to showing how and why making resource allocation decisions in the federal government is beset by complexities and how the professionals cope with their difficult tasks: "It [is] necessary to develop mechanisms, however imperfect, for helping men make decisions that are in some sense meaningful in a complicated world" (1964, p. 11). One might argue that his orientation was due simply to the time paths of these different intellectual currents: Simon and Lindblom had launched the problem-solving branch before Aaron wrote his pioneering book on budgeting, whereas the Tversky-Kahneman branch didn't get started until nearly a decade later. But there is a deeper explanation. Aaron did field research on federal budgeting, including 160 interviews with "agency heads, budget officers, Budget Bureau staff, appropriations committee staff, and Congressmen" (1964, p. v). He was not interested in how experimental subjects committed errors of judgment or choice in laboratory settings; he was interested in how real decision makers tackled problems of great complexity. Hence, he was intrigued by how they managed to do this extremely difficult task reasonably well. One sees in the book a respect for the decision makers, arising in large measure from an appreciation of the difficulty of the tasks they confronted.

Indeed, I suspect that the seriousness with which Aaron thought about the tasks of budgetary officials was part of a long-standing theme of his professional life: a passionate interest in the real-world problems confronting government officials in a modern society. (Helping to found Berkeley's Graduate School of Public Policy was another reflection of this theme.)

This is more than biographical detail. It also illustrates an important—though neglected—part of the problem-solving approach to bounded rationality: a close examination of decision makers' tasks. In Simon's pioneering formulation, the focus was always on a comparison between a decision maker's mental abilities and the complexity of the problem he or she faces: for example, "the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world—or even for a reasonable approximations to such objective rationality" (1957, p. 198). Thus, for Simon, as for Wildavsky, the idea of bounded rationality is not a claim about the brilliance or stupidity of human beings, independent of their task environments. Many social scientists miss this central point and reify the idea of BR into an assertion about the absolute capacities of human beings. The fundamental notion here is that of cognitive limits; and, as for any constraint, if cognitive constraints do not bind in a given choice situation, then they will not affect the outcome. And whether they bind depends vitally on the information-processing demands placed on the decision makers by the problem at hand. More vividly, Simon has called the joint effects of "the structure of task environments and the computational capacities of the actor ... a scissors [with] two blades" (1990, p. 7): Theories of BR have cutting power—especially when compared to theories of (fully) rational choice—only when both blades operate. Thus, any analysis that purports to fall into this branch of the research program yet examines only the agent's properties is badly incomplete.

Thus, Wildavsky not only belonged squarely in the problem-solving branch of the BR program; his intellectual propensities—his interest in how real officials tackle real problems of great complexity—predisposed him to use both blades of Simon's scissors. That was unusual. It was also productive: many of his insights about budgeting flowed from his effective use of Simon's scissors.

Of course, every research method focuses our attention on some scholarly questions in the domain at hand and deemphasizes others in that same domain. (Lindblom's warnings [1959] about the utopian folly of trying to be comprehensive apply to academics as well as to government officials.) So it is not surprising that Wildavky's research methods led him to ignore certain topics. In particular, his interest in applying the basic ideas of bounded rationality to the study of real-world budgeting steered him away from analyzing the foundations of BR theory. That simply was not part of his intellectual agenda. But a serious focus on those foundations is long overdue. Brilliant as they were, neither Simon nor Lindblom said it all. We political scientists—particularly those of us who work on the behavioral (bounded rationality) side—have done too much quoting and too little reworking. I believe that we will see vigorous scientific competition between rational choice (RC) theories of policy making and behavioral theories only if behavioralists take the foundations of their theories as seriously as RC theorists take theirs. Further, I think that this entails transforming verbal theories into mathematical models. (For an argument on this point in the context of incrementalism, see chapter 4.)

The next section surveys a family of theories that has been central to the problem-solving branch of the BR program: those that use the idea of aspiration levels as a major concept.

THEORIES OF ASPIRATION-BASED PROBLEM REPRESENTATION AND CHOICE

The main claim I offer in this section is that the idea of aspiration-based choice constitutes a major family of theories in the bounded rationality research program. The word family matters: I think it is a serious mistake to view satisficing per se as an alternative to theories of optimization. As careful scholars working in the optimization tradition have often...