Satisficing: Inevitable In The Real World

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Satisficing is a way of making decisions by looking at all available avenues until a threshold of acceptability is met (Simon, 1976). The term satisficing, created by Herbert Simon in 1956, was billed as a way for decision makers to find satisfactory answers in the real world. It is most useful in scenarios where an optimal solution cannot be determined and thus multiple solutions may need to be tested. One of the first keys to understanding satisficing is knowing that it works in, “bounded rationality” (Radner, 1975). Bounded rationality requires three things hold true in order for satisficing to work, which are, “1) existence of goals, (2) search for improvement, and (3) long-run success” (Radner, 1975). Herbert Simon believed that the real world could not always offer the opportunity to properly analyze and understand the best solution for problems (Simon, 1976). In coming up with satisficing there became an ability to find acceptable solutions to real world problems, without having to deal with over simplifying the issues.
Herbert Simon believed that there were four issues that prevented neoclassical economic theories from being applicable in the real world. The first problem is that most theories assume that the person who will be making the decisions knows every alternative …show more content…

Both deal with making predictions based off what can be reasonably known and not assumed. In incrementalism Charles Libblom notes that, “policy decisions are made not through means-ends reasoning process, but through…limited comparisons” (Williams & Callabrese, 2013). This is similar to satisficing because there is an acknowledgement that predictions must be based on the information at hand and not guesswork. A second theory that Satisficing resembles is the Optimum Decisions model. Both theories work with finding alternative solutions to the same problem in order to find an effective

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