Rational Routines - a podcast by MCMP Team

Martin Peterson (Eindhoven) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (18 June, 2014) titled "Rational Routines". Abstract: Recent research in evolutionary economics suggests that firms and other organizations are governed by routines. What distinguishes successful firms and organizations from less successful ones is that the former are better at developing, using and modifying routines that fit with the circumstances faced by the organization. Individual agents also rely on routines: many people do not actively choose what to eat for breakfast, or how to travel to work, or how to organize their daily activities in the office. In this talk I explore the hypothesis that routines, rather than preferences over uncertain prospects, should be used as the fundamental building block in theories that aim to analyze normative aspects of real-life decision making. I focus on a single, structural property of routines: I show that as long as routines are weakly monotonic (in a sense defined in the talk) the decision maker is rationally permitted to apply all routines available in a given time period, in any order, and there is no requirement to apply any routine more than once. Furthermore, there is no other way in which the same set of routines could be applied that would produce an operational state that is strictly better. I finally compare my results with some quite different claims about routines made by Krister Segerberg in the 1980's.

Further episodes of MCMP – Philosophy of Science

Further podcasts by MCMP Team

Website of MCMP Team