The paper provides an brief overview of the state of the art in the theory of rational decision making since the 1950's, and focuses specially on the evolutionary justification of rationality. It is claimed that this justification, and more generally the economic methodology inherited from the...

Replying to Queen Elizabeth II who in November 2008 asked why so few economists had warned about the emerging financial crisis, a group of eminent economists of the British Academy, claimed that while this failure had many causes, the most important was principally a failure of the collective...

Based on the work of Herbert A. Simon, the author critically reflects on the past and current state of crucial behavioural assumptions such as rational expectations and bounded rationality. Simon recognized that the core of every organization is the pattern underlying the division of tasks and...

The paper develops a theory of biases in decision making, where biases are intended as deviations from the decisions that should be prescribed on the ground of (theoretically) unlimited rationality. Systematic biases in decision making are interpreted as stable strategies built up in a boundedly...