Cognition, institutions, near decomposability: rethinking Herbert Simon's contribution

The first part of the paper, written in Memory of Herbert Simon, reconstructs the intellectual background of Simon “Bounded Rationality” approach, and shows how this approach leads to establish close connections among economics, psychology and cognitive sciences. The “Sciences of the Artificial”, namely organization theory, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, have received a great impulse from bounded rationality approach and provide new intellectual tools to investigate the classic, yet still unresolved, question of human creativity and learning, and their relationship with the evolution of institutions. In the second part of the paper we briefly review learning process, focusing the attention on “near decomposability”, a notion which plays a very important role in Simon’s theory of learning. We show that Simon ideas regarding near decomposability, that are far from being exploited by current research in economics, and that has been developed in biology to a much greater extent, can open new perspectives on some key questions concerning the organization of economic activities, and their distribution between market and non market coordination modes.