From bounded rationality to ecological rationality

Gigerenzer has spent four decades dismantling the assumption that rational decision-making means maximising expected utility, and this paper reads as a late summation of that project — a direct engagement with Simon's legacy and a critique of how economists domesticated bounded rationality into a tame addendum to optimisation models. The ecological turn is the key move: rationality is not a property of a mind in isolation but of a mind fitted to its environment, which means changing the environment can be as rational as changing the decision rule. For product direction, the implication is structural: the question is not how to nudge individuals toward better choices but how to design the decision ecology — the organisation, the interface, the information environment — so that simple heuristics produce good outcomes. The paper fills a genuine gap in the library's decision-making coverage, where Simon is present but his heirs (Gigerenzer, Kahneman's critics) are underrepresented. Published in Industrial and Corporate Change, it sits at the economics-cognition intersection that the library has identified as underdeveloped. Read alongside Simon's Administrative Behavior and Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow for the full triangulation of this debate.