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Introduction
Simon (1947) in his watershed work The Administrative Behaviour strongly questioned the concept of perfect rationality that dominated both common and scientific knowledge until the middle of the twentieth century. According to classical and neoclassical economists, a rational individual has unlimited cognitive capabilities, and his choice of behaviour is focused on maximizing his own expected utility (Walras, 1883). On the contrary, Simon, influenced by the works of positivist psychologists such as Freud and by Barnard’s (1938) fallacious man, highlighted the innate biological and rational bounds that let individuals deviate from the rational behaviour of classical economic models (Simon, 1955, 1956; March and Simon, 1958). Simon’s redefinition of human rationality, commonly known as bounded rationality, recalibrated the whole scientific literature concerned with human reasoning, including the management field and its later history (Kalantari, 2010; Kerr, 2007, 2011).
Due to the different disciplines involved, from its origins in the bounded rationality idea (Simon, 1947, 1957), this perennial concept has continuously evolved, thanks to cross-fertilization between natural science and social science scientific sub-fields concerned with the investigation of human reasoning (Kahneman, 2003; Gintis, 2006; Callebaut, 2007). For instance, thanks to Simon’s initial contribution in 1947, psychologists in the 1970s led research programmes on the hidden rules that govern our mind, i.e. heuristics(Tversky and Kahneman, 1973, 1974). Analysis deepened 20 years later in management research to identify what erratically drives executives’ decision-making (Hammond et al., 1998). Simon’s (2005) idea that the fitness of an organism to the environment depends on the adaptation of its decisions to environmental changes was also later studied by biology theorists (Gintis, 2006), psychologists (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier, 2011) and neuroscientists (Pascual-Leone et al., 2011) to explain, respectively, organism behaviours, the use and the adaptation of heuristics to the environment and brain modification depending on the stage of the human lifespan.
However, despite the various theoretical and empirical works published on bounded rationality over the past seven decades, scholars have highlighted that a work focused on how this concept impacted management research is both missing and needed – principally, to understand the concept’s major developments before moving beyond them (Selten, 1999; Gavetti, 2012). The main goal of this contribution is, therefore, to investigate the chronological advancements of bounded rationality undertaken in the...