Economics at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) in Pittsburgh

The chapter deals with economics at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration in Pittsburg, built by Herbert Simon, one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century, into an interdisciplinary research institution which made important contributions to behavioral economics, as well as operations research, experimental economics and theories of the firm. In particular the chapter examines Simon’s foundation of a behaviorist-institutionalist economics from Administrative Behaviour, the book where Simon shows how organizations can be understood in terms of their decision processes and formulates the concept of bounded rationality, to the more positive and formal characterization of the mechanisms of choice under conditions of bounded rationality in his successive contributions where the critique of neoclassical theory became more explicit.