A Generative View of Rationality and Growing Awareness.

In this paper we contrast bounded and ecological rationality with a proposed alternative, generative rationality. Ecological approaches to rationality build on the idea of humans as "intuitive statisticians" while we argue for a more generative conception of humans as "probing organisms." We first highlight how ecological rationality's focus on cues and statistics is problematic for two reasons: (a) the problem of cue salience, and (b) the problem of cue uncertainty.

More Thumbs Than Rules: Is Rationality an Exaptation?

The literatures on bounded and ecological rationality are built on adaptationism-and its associated modular, cognitivist and computational paradigm-that does not address or explain the evolutionary origins of rationality. We argue that the adaptive mechanisms of evolution are not sufficient for explaining human rationality, and we posit that human rationality presents exaptive origins, where exaptations are traits evolved for other functions or no function at all, and later co-opted for new uses. We propose an embodied reconceptualization of rationality-embodied rationality-based on the reuse of the perception-action system, where many neural processes involved in the control of the sensory-motor system, salient in ancestral environments have been later co-opted to create-by tinkering-high-level reasoning processes, employed in civilized niches.

Firms, crowds, and innovation.

The purpose of this article is to suggest a (preliminary) taxonomy and research agenda for the topic of "firms, crowds, and innovation" and to provide an introduction to the associated special issue. We specifically discuss how various crowd-related phenomena and practices-for example, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, user innovation, and peer production-relate to theories of the firm, with particular attention on "sociality" in firms and markets. We first briefly review extant theories of the firm and then discuss three theoretical aspects of sociality related to crowds in the context of strategy, organizations, and innovation: (1) (sociality as extension of rationality, sociality as sensing and signaling, sociality as matching and identity), (2) (independent/aggregate and interacting/emergent forms of sociality), and (3) (misattribution and misapplication).

Rationality, perception, and the all-seeing eye.

Seeing-perception and vision-is implicitly the fundamental building block of the literature on rationality and cognition. Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman's arguments against the omniscience of economic agents-and the concept of bounded rationality-depend critically on a particular view of the nature of perception and vision. We propose that this framework of rationality merely replaces economic omniscience with perceptual omniscience.

Game theory, conditional preferences, and social influence.

Neoclassical noncooperative game theory is based on a simple, yet powerful synthesis of mathematical and logical concepts: unconditional and immutable preference orderings and individual rationality. Although this structure has proven useful for characterizing competitive multi-player behavior, its applicability to scenarios involving complex social relationships is problematic. In this paper we directly address this limitation by the introduction of a conditional preference structure that permits players to modulate their preference orderings as functions of the preferences of other players.